> Sturnan, being already developed enough to quash such a basic change,
> would probably mimic it by having two subjects. One would probably be the
> normal "it". When the verb is intransitive, the subject would come after
> the verb. (This in no way makes Sturnan ergative. At least, I won't admit
> that it does, not in a dozen or so years.)
That is what i am planning on my word order doing in Minyeva... i call it
syntactically ergative, morphologically accusative. So, do you have
something against being ergative? :P
> Vot welku ikerag.
> It rain make-3s.
this "it" would be the environment pronoun (in Minyeva).
> Vot Dasen asag.
> It Jason is.
this "it" would be the indefinite person.
> Halvag vot.
> Happens it.
i assume this "it" would be referring back to some previous event, so "it"
would be a standard pronoun. Like:
"arg, i just stubbed my toe!"
"well, 'it' happens." (it referring to toe-stubbing)
> If you're not going to denote a thing by extra words or by infixes,
> you'll probably denote it by word order. Or you could leave it to whoever
> is unlucky enough to come across to figure out.
>
> The slightly confused
> Chris Wright
--
Garrett Jones
http://www.alkaline.org