From: "Steve Kramer" <scooter@...>
> I am not a linguist, nor do I play one on TV, so for me the construction
of my
> language has been a combination learning experience and artistic pursuit.
(I
> consider this a very *good* thing, btw.) And I have done my best to
educate
> myself before bringing stupid questions to the list...however, I'm not
quite
> able to understand some of what's going on, and I'd appreciate any help
from the
> list's more educated members.
>
> 1. I've noticed the term "ergative" used to describe some languages, but
I'm
> not able to find a definition or, more importantly for me, an example. Is
there
> anyone who could explain the concept?
"Ergative" means a case that is entirely devoted to expressing the agent
("A") of an action (<erg-> 'work', so something like 'worker'). This is
specially contrasted to "nominative", where the case of A _also_ expresses
the subject of a statement ("S").
In English, you have "X.nom hit Y.acc; Y.nom cried."
In an ergative language it'd be more like "X.erg hit Y.abs; Y.abs cried."
(Absolutive is a case that represents both S and "P", the patient of an
action. Accusative only represents P.)
At least, that's how I understand it.
> 2. Similarly, I've noticed that there's an ASCII translation for the
sounds of
> the IPA, which I've only recently discovered. Unfortunately, I don't know
all
> the sounds represented by the IPA, and the one Web page I found which
gives the
> ASCII equivalents was rather opaque for me. Are there any layman's
explanations
> available, perhaps with references to sounds in relatively common
languages?
There's a program called "IPA-Help" you can download.
http://www.sil.org/computing/catalog/ipahelp.html
It has example sound files for all the symbols in the chart, as well as a
bunch of natlang examples.
*Muke!