Re: some questions

Etak wrote:

> 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...)
Actually, that's ergative/absolutive.

Nominative-accusative languages are where you have a sentence where the
subjects of in- and transitive sentences are marked with the one case
(nominative) and the direct object of transitive sentences is marked with
another case (accusative). Ergative-absolutive languages are where the subjects
of intransitive sentences and the direct objects of transitive sentences are
marked with one case (ergative), and the subjects of transitive sentences are
marked with another case (absolutive).

> [snip]
> Does anyone have a list of possible noun cases, nominative, genative, etc.?
> I'm trying to think of what cases I want my conlang nouns to have, but I
> don't even kow what the possibilities are.  I know what the cases in Latin
> are, except the ablative. That one has me kind of confused.
Yeah, it's a bit weird... But here's a good list to start with:
http://phrontistery.50megs.com/cases.html

> [snip]
> 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.
>
No, there's no such rule! I'm pretty sure Tzeltal (see tzeltal.org - click
on "Download") uses prefixes to conjugate verbs (or at least, it uses em to
express things like 'my father': s- 'my' + tat 'father' = stat 'my father').

--Trebor

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