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

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 11:56 AM, Adam Raizen <adam.raizen@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Formally, it is a bit weird, but I think that the actual cognitive
> structures that speakers of Lojban use are the same as those used by
> speakers of accusative languages (and that would be the case even if a
> monolingual native speaker of an ergative language learned Lojban fluently.)

I tend to agree.

If Lojban had lots more gismu pairs like citka/cidja, tirna/savru,
bacru/voksa, and assuming those pairs were more or less identical in
meaning except for the argument order (which is probably not really
the case now), then it could be argued that it was neutral with
respect to the accusative/ergative divide.

A speaker with accusative tendencies would go with "lo smacu cu ca'o
citka lo cirla", and a speaker with ergative tendencies would say "lo
cirla cu ca'o cidja lo mlatu", and they would both mean exactly the
same thing.

We do have such pairs for all predicates if we count viska/selviska,
catra/selcatra, and so on, but the ergative-like one is marked, so
there is a bias towards the accusative alignment.

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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