Re: Animacy in active languages (was Re: Non-static verbs?)

Nik Taylor wrote:

> Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> > It would make things much easier if there were widely accepted terms.
> I think "nominative" and "absolutive" are fairly widely accepted.  Those
> are the terms I used when I was experimenting with an active system in
> W's clitics.
Yes, and also "ergative/absolutive", but they are misleading. I think
these labels were used when describing active langs before one realized
that they actually were "active" and not just some weird combination
of ergative and accusative systems.

And I think active/stative is more common than active/inactive.
Although most labels would be misleading since -- as have already
been pointed out like a million times -- all active languages
differ in the way they are active. Sometimes there actually is
a distinction between active and stative, but there are just as
many cases where this is not at all the case. And on top of that,
most of these langs don't even have cases, but rather verbal
agreement, nominative/absolutive would then be even stranger to use.
So what to do? Perhaps Dixon's split-S and fluid-S works. They are
in any case very neutral terms. But that doesn't give names for
the case/agreementaffixes themselves. Perhaps agent/patient or
just I/II.

Or simply use ergative/absolutive or active/inactive and explain
exactly how they are used in this particular language.

Daniel