Re: some questions

Etak wrote:
>
> Hello
>    Could someone please explain the difference between
> nominative/accusative languages and ergative/ablative
> ones.  (I think I've got the names right.  I'm not
> even sure about that...)  They seem to crop up at odd
> times in various messages and I don't know what they
> mean.
As others have said, ergative/absolutive treats the subject of an
intransitive verb like that object of a transitive one.  This may show
up only in case (if any), so that verbs still agree with the nominative
(that is, subject of an intransitive or subject of a transitive), or may
also affect verbal agreement (if any).

There are other ways that the distinction can show up.  For example:

Cross-reference
John hit his brother and ran
  In a nom/acc pattern, the subject of "ran" must be the same as the
    subject of "hit"
  In an erg/abs pattern, the subject of "ran" must be the same as the
    *object* of "hit"

Word order
Nom/Acc: John ran, John hit the ball
Erg/Abs: Ran John, John hit the ball (i.e., ergative verb absolutive)

Transitive/Intransitive pairs
Nom/Acc:
John ate
John ate the steak
(John has the same relation to the verb "ate" in both sentences, that
is, he's the one putting food into his stomach)

Erg/Abs
The house burned
John burned the house
*John burned (impossible in the sense of "John was the person who burned
   something", only possible in a sense like "John sat out in the sun
   too long and burned")
(House has the same relation to the verb "burn" in both sentences, that
is, it is the entity being consumed by fire in either case)

Obligatory arguments (not always applicable)
In English, every verb must have a subject, whether transitive or
intransitive.  In some transitive verbs, you can drop the object ("John
ate" is as grammatical as "John ate the steak") - but note that there
are a few ergative-acting verbs, like "burn" above!
In an ergative language, you might have a requirement that every verb
have an absolutive, thus "Ate the steak" would be as grammatical as
"John ate the steak".
Just as in English, you can use a special verb form, the passive, if you
don't know the agent ("the steak was eaten"), so in some ergative
languages you can have a special form, the antipassive, if you don't
know the patient, thus, "John [special form of ate]"

> But are there other possible cases?
>    Also, what are the "universals" that people
> occasionly mention.  Are they important?
Most universals are actually universal tendencies, things that tend to
happen more often than chance.  For example, languages that have subject
object verb order often, but not always, use postpositions (just like
prepositions, except that they go *after* the noun).  Latin, for
example, is an exception to that rule.  There are a few absolute
universals - altho those are probably just ones that are so rarely
broken no one's run across the exception yet!  :-)

>    I'm working on an inflecting language and I've made
> the case markers for nouns as suffixes.  Would it look
> too strange, or break some (unknown to me) linguistic
> rule to conjugate verbs by adding prefixes.
Not at all.  Many languages use prefixes.  There's a *tendency* for
languages to use either mostly suffixes or mostly prefixes, but it's not
impossible for a language to mix the two.  My own Uatakassi uses both.
:-)  Nouns have gender/number prefixes and suffixes for number and case
(yes, number is marked twice!  :-)  I think that might be unique), while
verbs have up to 3 prefixes, one for voice, one for tense, and one that
consists of one meaning "if (contrafactual)", one meaning "then" (as in
if/then), and one meaning "must", and then up to 2 suffixes,
person/number and aspect.

--
"There's no such thing as 'cool'.  Everyone's just a big dork or nerd,
you just have to find people who are dorky the same way you are." -
overheard
ICQ: 18656696
AIM Screen-Name: NikTaylor42