Re: CHAT: Glottalized consonants

> Date:         Mon, 17 May 1999 16:44:29 +0200
> From: Christophe Grandsire <Christophe.Grandsire@...>
>         I think Hittite and Anatolian languages were ergative, but I
> think also I heard it was supposed to be innovations of those
> languages, not conservation of a feature of PIE.
The Hittite case came up on the IndoEuropean list recently. It seems
that the so-called ergativity goes like this: When an inanimate noun
is the subject of a transitive verb, it takes a suffix -ant which
otherwise forms collectives and/or denominal adjectives. These nouns
still take the nominative as subject of an intransitive verb, and the
accusative as an object, so it's not a real ergative system.

However, the oldest Hittite sources used the nominative in transitive
subject position too, so it's an innovation. Since Hittite is the
oldest known Anatolian language, I assume the same goes for the whole
group.

>         BTW, has anyone heard of a theory which would say that PIE
> was an active language that evolved to accusative somewhere (most IE
> languages) and to ergative somewhere else (Hittite and Anatolian
> languages)?
Typologically, active languages are very rare, and AFAIK there's no
evidence to support such a type for PIE or its prestages. So I'd very
much doubt that anyone's working on that now. (See my earlier post on
the ideological reason for this view being held in Russia earlier).

Also, most people who think active languages evolve into accusative
ones, believe that they go through an ergative stage first. So an
active prestage doesn't explain ergative daughter languages, should
they exist, better than an ergative prestage would.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)