Re: verbs?

"Thomas R. Wier" wrote:
> > As long as you have it include monster raving loony languages ...
> > PS A "monster raving loony language" is one that marks intransitive subject
> > different from both transitive subject and transitive object, but the later
> > two the same. My faith in humanity's collective mental health was severely
> > dented when I learned of their existence.
>
> Do you have a citation on that? I'd love to know more about it.
Some Iranian languages do that for past tense verbs, but not present
tense.  Historically, in the past tense of transitive verbs, the agent
was marked with the genitive and the patient with nominative (often
referred to as "absolutive", but historically cognate with the
nominative of other IE langs), while in the present tense, agent was
absolutive and patient was accusative.  Later, phonetic changes merged
the genitive and accusative into a single oblique case, giving the
following situation:

        Present Tense   Past Tense
Agent   Absolutive      Oblique
Patient Oblique         Absolutive
(Intransitive verbs of both tenses still use absolutive for the sole
argument)

Later, analogy caused the patient in past tense to be marked the same
way as in present tense, i.e., with oblique.  Thereby creating the
modern form wherein, for past tense forms, a single case, oblique, is
used for both agent and patient, while another case, absolutive, is used
for intransitive verbs.

A related language, Oros^ori, has gone further to make the past tense
agent absolutive, recreating a more typical situation, wherein both
present and past tense have an accusative-type marking.

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