Re: Georgian Case (Was Re: Polysynthetic nouns)

From:    David Peterson <ThatBlueCat@...>
> Thomas wrote:
> <<Just call it "ergative";=A0 "narrative" case is nonstandard among
> anglophone Kartvelologists.>>
>
> <<snipping the rest>>
>
> As anyone can see by reading Thomas's post, I made dozens of mistakes.
> [...]  First of all, my presentation was an attempt to explain Stephen
> Anderson's *deeply* flawed explanation of the Georgian verbal agreement
> system [...] I created my own based on this website:
>
> <http://www.armazi.com/georgian/>
>
> which is a descriptive grammar, not (to the best of my knowledge) written
> by a linguist.   All the terminology is different, and there's a lot
> that isn't explained that needs to be.   I blame this site for my confusion
> about the preverbs!   ;)   Just kidding: It's all me.
No, no... you actually got the basic gist of it.  And having looked at
that website, I can now see why you'd come to your conclusions.  He says
some things there that are either plainly false, or misleading, as when
he states that all intransitives take an argument in the nominative case.

> And what I meant by saying that preverbs are essentially meaningless is
> that they're meaningless *inflectionally*. Of course they're derivational
> prefixes.   What I meant was that if you were going to try to attach
> inflectional information to the preverbs, you'd be led down a long and
> twisted road. My apologies for all the gaffes.   Everything was done
> from memory.
If you're interested in further research on Georgian, I'd suggest
Howard Aronson's _Georgian: a Reading Grammar_. You can both teach
yourself to read Georgian, and it gives a lot of good linguistic
analysis in it to boot. It's also basically the standard reference
grammar in the English language. Tschenkeli wrote a two volume German
textbook several decades ago; it's out of date, but it has many good
exercises. I would suggest that you *not* use George Hewitt's book
because (aside from the fact that the guy is a Georgia-hating
Abkhaz nationalist and therefore kinda scary) it is just a little
better than pedagogically useless, and frequently misleading as to
structure.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637