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

David G. Durand wrote:
>   A, S, P together: rare system, no case or dependable syntactic marking of
> argument roles. I've never seen examples of this, but it's claimed to
> exist, and depends heavily on context or paraphrase to distinguish agent
> and patient.
I've read of a language which I guess would fit in that catagory.
There's no distinction on the noun, but there are 20 different genders,
and the verb agrees with the subject and object in gender, so that the
possibility of ambiguity is virtually nill.  There's also the system in
Algonquian languages (I forget the term), where the noun ranking higher
in animacy goes before the noun ranking lower in animacy.  If the noun
ranking lower in animacy is the agent, then there is a special marking
on the noun to indicate that.  (I may be mis-remembering some of the
details).

> Nor is it necessarily in other languages, but usually the distinction is
> not marked in absolute terms, but in relative ones. So "the door knocked
> over the candle" marks door as agent, and candle as patient, even if the
> door was blown by the wind, because it's _more_ an agent than the candle is.
Door may also be in the instrumental in many languages.

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