>Welcome to the list, from a fellow gay Canadian conlanging linguist who
likes
>Montreal (I spent a semester hanging out in the linguistics department at
McGill
>a few years ago, working on Malagasy).
Oy... you sound like my third boyfriend (the eccentric gay Canadian
Esperantist of Scottish descent into conlanging too - although he doesn't
actually conlang, he just reads other peoples').
Malagasy, eh? Did you have Prof. Travis?
>As someone else whose conlang makes creative use of case-marking, I must
say I'm
>quite interested in your nominative/ergative/absolutive system. Could you
give
>some more information on how it works? From your few examples, it appears
that
>the ergative case is associated with agents, absolutive case with patients
>(anything undergoing a change of location or state), and nominative with
themes
>(arguments of states). Is that right?
Something like that.
Here are some other usages:
Iar skici clairan.
I-erg break-past-prog window-abs.
"I broke the window."
Skici clairan.
break-past-prog window-abs
"The window broke/got broken."
There's no passive voice. Literally, you could say "clair staï r'skicand"
(the window was being broken), but that would sound very very foreign.
However, a similar construction "clair staer r'skicaband" (the window is
[having-been-]broken) is possible.