Re: Compound cases (was Re: Re: Ergative or Vocative?)

Eric Christopherson wrote:
> That's an interesting idea to make the oblique different only in some words.
> As for ergative, I mark it with <-w> after the gender marker (so <-aw> for
> animate and <-uw> for inanimate, although I've considered using inanimates
> ONLY for objects, so ergative wouldn't be necessary.)
Makes sense.  Many languages avoid having inanimate in the agent role.
Even English has that tendency, one would be more likely to say "I got
hit by a bus" than "A bus hit me", the second sounds awkward and
unnatural, tho grammatical, because it makes bus, an inanimate object,
the subject.

And, -uw would, I'd think, be hard to distinguish from -u (assuming, of
course, that {u} = /u/ and {w} = /w/)

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