Acc/Erg/Etc sans Cases

Emaelivpeith Christophe Grandsire:
>Cases are not necessary to categorise a language as
>accusative/ergative/active/whatever.
I didn't know that!  Now I can figure out what Asha'ille is.  :)

>"he kicked the woman and ran away".
Y'know, you guys are too violent for me.  The last CONLANG sentence I
translated, I had to invent a word for "to hit".  Now "to kick."  Hrmph!
;)  Anyhow:

    Gghechivpaerdhi ar ne cahnen t'lámasaev.
    /XE_X"XEtSIv,erDI Ar n@ kAnEn t@"lAm@sev/
    kick-PST-UNS he OBJ: woman and-flee

The second verb is understood to take the same suffixes as the most recent
verb with explicit suffixes.  Therefore, |lámasaev| is understood to
reallly mean |lámasaevpaerdhi|, but you won't need to say any more suffixes
until you wish to change the ones declared by |gghechivpaerdhi|.

If I wanted to say instead "he kicked the woman and _she_ ran away", it
would be:

    Gghechivpaerdhi ar ne cahnen t'lámasaev ah.
    kick-PST-UNS he OBJ: woman and-flee she

But things get complicated by the new way person conjugation works...  I'll
get a post out on it.

>The unexpressed subject of the
>intransitive verb is taken to be the subject of the transitive verb. The
>language is thus syntactically accusative, since it maps subjects of
>intransitive verbs with *subjects* of intransitive verbs.
So Asha'ille is syntactically accusative, right?  It doesn't care whether
the verbs involved are transitive or intransitive, though -- whatever the
subject, object, tense, etc of the preceding verb, the same information is
copied onto the following verb(s).


--
AA


Bia Sharidim ("New Words")
============
|gghechiv| /XE_X"XEtSIv/  "to kick". from |ghachiv| "to slap, hit"
|lámasaev| /"lAm@sev/     "to flee, run away" esp. with the intention of
                          escaping from (deserved) punishment.  from
                          |mmasaev| "to walk"
|-aerdhi|  /"erDI/        conjugation for a general, unspecified person