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

[Cyril Slobin <cyril@slobin.pp.ru>]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 5:21 PM, Adam Raizen <adam.raizen@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

This has remembered me a motto from CONLANG list maybe ten or so years
ago, during du'emoi discussion on accusative/ergative topic:

"Murder is just transitive death".

-- 
http://slobin.pp.ru/ `When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said,
<cyril@slobin.pp.ru> `it means just what I choose it to mean'


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