Re: Minhyan & the goddess of conlangs

Jeffrey wrote:

<<Minhyan does not have a nominative-accusative case system (as most
Indo-European languages do) but an active-stative system:  the agent of the
verb is always in the agentive case and the patient of the verb is always in
the patientive case.  (In a nominative-accusative case system, the patient
of the intransitive verb is in the nominative case.)>>

What you describe sounds like a standard ergative-absolutive system.   For
it to be like your terminology suggests, you'd need the following:

(1) The man-ACT. eats pizza-PAT.
(2) The man-ACT. ran.
(3) The man-PAT. appeared yesterday.

Some questions that remain...

(4) The man-? loves the dog-?.
(5) The man-? seems upset to the woman-?.
(6) The man-? cried (on purpose vs. on accident?).

Also, these can actually be done a number of ways:

(7) I-ACT. asked my father-? for money-?.
(8) I-ACT. gave the man-? a house-?.

I got these last two from an article which can be downloaded
here:

http://ling.ucsd.edu/~djp/ling142/misc/clausetypes.pdf

It details different types of accusative and ergative languages.
But for an active language, let's go to good ol' _Describing
Morphosyntax_...

Page 145 talks about Lakhota.   It sounds like what you're
talking about.   Guaymi as well on page 145 and 146.
Chicasaw, page 148, has a three way system, so it's (without
duplicating the Chicasaw parts):

I-Marker1 act good.   (Volitional.)
I-Marker2 am good.   (Non-volitional.)
I-Marker3 feel good.   (Experiencer.)

So do any of these come close to how your system works?

-David
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