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

----- Original Message -----
From: Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
To: Multiple recipients of list CONLANG <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Friday, October 8, 1999 5:47 PM
Subject: 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/)
If I did use <-uw>, it would either be manifested as [u:] or [uw@].