Re: ergative? I don't know...

Sally Caves scripsit:

> Nothing does more violence
> to a beloved and long established conlang than to
> dicker with its pronouns.
Depends on the type of conlang.  Among natlangs, some conserve
their pronouns fiercely, like IE, and some freely adopt and mutate
them, like Japanese, from ordinary nouns.

> And
> I have heard that modern Turkish was drastically doctored up by its
> grammarians.
Mostly, I think, in getting rid of Persian and Arabic loanwords,
creating a language with a mostly transparent morphology.  I think
the syntax has remained Turkic pretty much throughout.

> No one knows exactly why the London dialect
> threw out perfectly good _hem_ and _hir_ and adopted the Northern
> variations: _them_ and _their_.
Well, surely because of incipient collapse with "him" and "her".
Ditto the adoption of "she" to avoid collapse with "he".
Anyway, "hem" is by no means extinct in the spoken language:
"I saw 'em" is very ordinary colloquial English.

This form cannot result from the dropping of "th", because such a salient
consonant as "th" is most unlikely to be dropped, and indeed there
are no other examples.  So it is a survival.

--
John Cowan      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
        You tollerday donsk?  N.  You tolkatiff scowegian?  Nn.
        You spigotty anglease?  Nnn.  You phonio saxo?  Nnnn.
                Clear all so!  'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)