Re: CONLANG Digest - 21 Feb 2004 to 22 Feb 2004 (#2004-52)

Christophe Grandsire eskriviw:

<<And what about all the languages that, like Basque, agree with the
ergative, the absolutive and the beneficiary (dative) of the action?
:))) With the fact that the absolutive mark is the only one *all*
verbs
always have (the ergative agreement exists only for transitive
verbs, and
the beneficiary is often used but usually optional), it would mean
that
the subject here is what we usually call the object. And my little
booklet agrees with that :)) >>

Strange as it may be, my Gramática Elemental Vasca merely calls them
Sujeto-NOR, Sujeto-NORK and Sujeto-NORI. A vanilla icecream.

-------------------
Also,
John Quijada wrote:
<<the loss of Proto-IE ergativity in its present-day
daughter languages except Armenian, then seeing it re-arise in
modern
Hindi),>>

From what little I know about Armenian, it doesn't show any
significant traces of ergativity at all.

-- Yitzik

Reply