On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 3:52 PM, tijlan
<pascal.akihiko@gmail.com> wrote:
Now if
a hypothetical place structure of "viska" is such that the x2 is the
agent of "seeing", it remains as the subject, not the object, despite
the conversion.
You mean a selbri with the place structure of 'selviska', but atomic, not derived by conversion? I don't think so. Even though you changed the order of the arguments to something very unconventional, my guess is that the syntactic structure in the heads of people who actually used that word in that language would put the agent as the object. One would have to do linguistic experiments with a native speaker to tell for sure.
Likewise, the hypothetical word order in "klama lo
nanmu" simply means that "lo nanmu" is the agentive subject of
"klama", which could still be used to correspondently translate
sentences of either ergative-absolutive ("Etorri da | gizonak.") or
nominative-accusative ("Ekalvenis | viro.").
I don't quite follow you. Is "Etorri da gizonak" good Basque? It looks like it contradicts your above sentence.
The point is that, in
Lojban, speakers of either type can talk without unlearning their
native perspective of the linguistic alignment, apart from the word
order.
A Basque speaker sees the argument of an intransitive verb (which is always x1 in Lojban) as occupying the same syntactic role as the object of a transitive verb (which for our purposes we'll say is x2 in Lojban. It certainly isn't x1.) A Lojban speaker, who knows the languages, sees x1 and x2 as syntactically distinct, which is why Lojban's morphosyntactic alignment is different from Basque's.