Re: Attached Verbs
| From: | Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, February 21, 2001, 2:57 |
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J Matthew Pearson wrote:
> Incidentally, how do you know that Arabic treats the copula as transitive?
> Couldn't it be that accusative is the unmarked case in Arabic? (Cf. English
> "It is me" or French "C'est moi".)
Well, with the French, _moi_ is simply the free form of the pronoun,
contrasting with the clitic _je_ and _me_, and with English, arguably,
"me" is the same way. Classic Arabic has 3 cases, nominative -u,
accusative -a, genitive -i. My source doesn't say much about how
they're used. Someone with more knowledge on Arabic will have to answer
that.
Still, if it's possible for the accusative to be the unmarked case,
could it be possible for the ergative to also be an unmarked case?
Or, maybe in Patrick's language, the verb meaning "be" originally meant
something like "become", which would then be more sensible to use
ergative and absolutive, and it could've kept the cases, even after it
came to mean "be".
--
Cenedl heb iaith, cenedl heb galon
A nation without a language is a nation without a heart - Welsh proverb
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