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

My 'Grammaire Basque' doesn't know any Ergative at all
! But it knows something called 'Active', and
apparently it's the same thing. In fact, it's a
reedition from an original book edited in 1944. So
it's a rare document, it allows us to see how the
denominations have changed through 60 years.

The author mentions the following cases in Basque:
- Nominative
- Active
- Mediative
- Inessive
- Elative
- Adlative
- Locative Genitive
- Possessive Genitive
- Dative
- Unitive
- Partitive
- Prolative

Nominative would probably be called Absolutive
nowadays, and Unitive looks like Comitative. As to
Prolative, I'm still trying to understand what is this
kind of animal ('used in place of the preposition
*for*', and applying only to Indefinite).

What's very interesting is the Number; there is
Singular, Plural, no Dual, but an Indefinite Number:
*zoin hiritan* means *in what city* or *in what
cities*. This is a very good idea I think. In
counterpart, no Gender, so shall we suppose that the
Basque think that the difference between man and woman
is too insignifiant to be mentioned ? In that case
there are probably wrong. Man and woman brains are
very different, not to speak about the rest of it.

--- Isaac Penzev <isaacp@...> wrote:
> 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.
>

=====
Philippe Caquant

"Le langage est source de malentendus."
(Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

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