[lojban] Re: nominative-accusative & ergative-absolutive

[tijlan <pascal.akihiko@gmail.com>]

2009/2/16 Adam Raizen <adam.raizen@gmail.com>:
> So then does English also buffer the difference between the two, since it
> also does not morphologically specify case?

Though irregularly, it does specify for at least some of the pronouns.
In "I saw him", the accusative case of "him" is morphologically
specified (in contrast to "he"). So is "I".


> I think Lojban is as
> nominative-accusative as it gets. (Predicate logic was invented by people
> who spoke and were familiar with nominative-accusative languages.) If the
> correct Lojban for the first sentence were "klama lo nanmu" (not "klama *fa*
> lo nanmu), then we could probably say that Lojban is ergative-absolutive.

Syntactic ergativity is quite rare
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative-absolutive_language). And I
don't see why the x2 of "klama" being the agent/subject would be so
indicative of an ergative-absolutive syntax. The Basque example
already shows that the subject doesn't necessarily follows the verb in
an ergative-absolutive language. I've learned that there are also
nominative-accusative languages where the verb preceds the subject,
such as formal Arabic, Gaelic, Hawaiian, and, to a lesser extent,
Romanian, Hungarian and Finnish.


mu'o mi'e tijlan


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