Re: Ergative and other questions

Staving Carsten Becker:
>Hello,
>
>Starting to read all those 200 emails from this mailing list, I tripped over
>terms such as
>
>1. "Ergative",
>2. "Absolutive",
>3. "transitive" and
>4. "intransitive".
>
>As newbie, I absolutely do not know what they mean. As for the cases, I
>already looked on that SIL linguistic terms lexicon page, but there they
>spoke about "transtive" and "intransitive" verbs. I heard about these, but I
>never really understood what they mean. Regarding absolutive and ergative, I
>know that Basque makes this difference, but as I said already, I did not
>understand what this is.
A transitive verb is one whereby a subject acts on an object. "The man fed
the dog." It has two arguments. An intransitive verb is where the subject
acts in isolation. "The man ate." It has one argument.

In most IE languages, the nominative case denotes the subject of any verb,
and the accusative the object of a transitive verb. In Basque, the ergative
case denotes the subject of a transitive verb, and the absolute denotes
either the object of a transitive verb or the subject of an intransitive one.


>An addtional question, not referring to my actual one and rather OT: I saw
>mails where people were quoted and instead of "Bla Blablabla *wrote*" it
>read "Bla Blablabla scripsit", "sikyal" or "palsalge" - which languages are
>these words from?
>
"scripsit" is Latin, but most of the rest come from the conlangs of the
authors of the messages. "Staving" is Khangaþyagon.

Pete