[2798] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: syntactic anomaly
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Wed Jan 26 10:41:58 1994
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@klingon.East.Sun.COM>
From: nsn@vis.mu.OZ.AU (Nick NICHOLAS)
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@klingon.East.Sun.COM>
Date: Thu, 27 Jan 94 2:37:28 EDT
In-Reply-To: <199401261519.AA07773@cad.gatech.edu>; from "Mark Reed" at Jan 26,
94 10:19 am
batlh choja', Mark Reed quv:
(btw, I'd just like to say that I find Lawrence's postings here consistently
informative, well-thought-out, and/or entertaining ;) )
=<raises hand>
=What's an ergative language? For some reason, we never got around to coverin
g
=them in the one year of introductory linguistics I took. :)
In brief: look up the mail item Lawrence was responding to. (Allow me to
be slightly chuffed because it was a mail item *I*'d sent ;) ). I'll
forward it to you if you can't find it.
Ergatives are the one linguistic item I can't really grok. "So, The Terran
Walks, but The Terran Kills... By The Klingon. Huh?" I suppose that's why
Okrand didn't use it; he didn't want his brain fried either ;) . Seriously,
though, I have seen some garbage about the 'passivity' of ergative language
cultures (since subject gets correlated with patient, rather than agent);
that's the kind of pop waffle that one should be wary of. Exotic languages
are hardly exotic to their speakers... (This has obvious implications for
Klingon, of course. Which reminds me that I *still* have to get through
that Hixkaryana book.)
(If trI'Qal starts growling about this banter about ergatives being
veQ mu'mey... *bites his tongue*. Never mind. This stuff is good for you;
bit of linguistic education never hurt.)
My boss, being obsessed with Acehnese, a major language of Sumatra ---
inevitably ergative --- got me to help him program a database so he could
do discourse analysis on texts. Acehnese has a split-ergative system. I
haven't 100% grokked what that means yet, but it does mean intransitive
verbs can quite merrily have objects. *shudder* Who said Hol'a''e' was
wierd? ;)
Speaking of which, wierd = taQ is yet another of those items present in
only the K-E section of TKD.
--
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| "One must first know that traditionally a Japanese bus has carried not |
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\||||nsn@krang.vis.mu.oz.au||||||Transient Passenger|||||||Nick Nicholas||||
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