Re: Lost in the wayside

    As it seems my last email was lost in the wayside, I would like to know
what the ergative case is.

    THanks for your time
    Patrick
    Blaze your trail

    Welcome back, Patrick, not lost in the wayside.

    In it simplest form, ergative is the noun case for the subject of a
transitive verb, versus "Nominative" or "Absolutive" for the subject of an
intransitive verb AND the object of a transitive.  This would suggest that
ergative would most often apply to animate nouns, but as I recall, that
isn't the case in Basque, where any transitive subj. is in the erg.  I
recall examples from my old Basque grammar:  "the hand (erg.) has 5 fingers"
and the odd "that white powder(erg.) made me sneeze" (hmmmm.).

    From past discussions here, it seems that Georgian and Australian
languages do restrict their erg. to animates, and have more complicated
systems than Basque.