I heard about ergativity and naturally the first thing to do was to open the wikipedia article. I read the first two sentences and was like 'wtf is this?!, let me check RUclips, there must be some smart guy there who explains that in human language' and hopefully there was. I really liked the vid and being a language geek myself I instantly subscribed to your channel and I'm about to watch your other videos in a minute. BTW you are the guy who created Valyrian and Dothraki, right? I greatly admire your work, didn't know you have a RUclips channel but rest assured that you have a loyal fan here (y) (y) (y), keep up the good work and go on making more videos and languages, we really admire them!
Wikipedia is very jargon heavy, especially in its opening paragraphs. That can make it super fast to look stuff up if you already know the field's jargon (no pesky explanations you don't need), but it's super slow if you don't know the jargon.
Im imagining an underwater plant that looks like coral or an anemone. It has another lure, like smell or something that looks like food. Would be similar to a Venus fly trap.
In the example at 10:25 I remembered that ergative language may be useful to simplify sentences in which the intransitive clause is a natural direct consequence of the action of the transitive one (like a medial voice). For example, "the girl slammed the door and closed.". This sentence would seem very weird in English, but for an ergative language it would make pretty much sense. In the example at 10:25, dancing is not a natural direct consequence of hugging, but rather a further action done immediately after it.
So glad this channel exists. I've seen this explained multiple times in my conlang group, but could never wrap my head around what the terms ultimately meant for usage. You actually explain things in an awesomely straightforward manner, and it's crazy helpful. I appreciate your book for the same reason. Now when I see posts about these points I'll actually know what I'm looking at. :)
> Kirik logum ??? niwa ?? su ?? veyam The last example is the start of an explanation why ergative languages bother with an antipassive voice. Consider this > The girl hugged the fish and it danced. "Fish" is associated with both verbs but it has a different role - exactly the same problem. So we can either use a pronoun (etc. "deixis") or we can do something with the verb to make the cases align ("valency change" or "voice"). > The fish got hugged by the girl and danced. This valency-changing strategy works in ergative languages, but you have to *give* instead of get. Something like this: > The girl gave her hug to the fish and danced. Because the primitive meaning "give" is the opposite of "get" this is called an anti-passive. More precisely, the "give" verb means something like "she-self cause girl" - "kiri" has to end up in the absolutive case so the reflexive marker is the agent. Let's make "bo" the verb and "te" a reflexive pronoun. > Kiri tek bom logu niwaz su veyam Girl she-self made hug to fish and danced. Or phrased a little differently Girl, made by herself to hug fish, danced. That's the basic idea. In practice this voice is used a lot and will be abbreviated, but the patient usually ends up with some kind of "towards" or "for sake of" preposition to associate it with the auxiliary. And there might be a reflexive or reciprocal hanging around.
So the ergative example carried over to real English would be: "The fish was hugged by the girl and danced." Do ergative languages use the passive form the same way we do?
Basically, they're transitive sentences are normally passive, so they need to use an "antipassive" voice if they want there transitive sentences to be active like ours normally are.
As it encoded in the very name, it's the contrary. Think of it as this: you have two options: "the girl hugs a fish"+"the girl danced" and "the girl hugs a fish"+"a fish danced". In a nominative language you can do the former without special constructions: "The girl-NOM hugs a fish-ACC and (the girl-NOM) danced". But for the latter you should use passive: "The fish-NOM was hugged by the girl-OBL and (the fish-NOM) danced". In an ergative languages tables turn. "The default scenario" is "A fish-ABS was hugged by the girl-ERG and (a fish-ABS) danced". But if it was the girl who danced, you should use antipassive to make the girl be in absolutive instead of ergative, and a fish in oblique (usually dative) instead of absolutive.
Yes and no. It's actually called the antipassive, but it's conceptually the equivalent construction. Instead of reducing valency and promoting P to S, you reduce valency and promote A to S. So it would sound something like "The girl hugged of a fish and danced"
Some accusative languages seem to switch to unmarked P-marked A when in passive voice. The first example is in Latin, because of its excellent compact passive, which I really miss in other Indoeuropean languages I know. Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not a Latin expert: Pisce flos consummatur [fish-ABL flower-NOM consume-3SG/PRAES/PASS] "By-fish flower is-consumed" Older Polish used to mark the agent with the instrumental case, like in this Mediaeval hymn (10-13th century): Bogurodzica Dziewica, Bogiem sławiena Maryja [godparent virgin, God-INSTR praise-PART* Mary-NOM] "Mother-of-God Virgin, by-God praised Mary" PART* being a feminine passive participle. Nowadays, it would be possible for an unanimate agent, but animate agents need a "przez" ~= "by" preposition with the agent in accusative case. The instrumental case makes the actor feel like a helpless tool. I think that Russian still uses the instrumental for both cases. Even in modern English: "The fish is consumed by the flower", while the cases are not marked by suffixes, "by" indicates an instrumental role on the flower, while the fish is unmarked. I think what is going on here is that passivity reverses the logic of A vs P, so the grammatical subject has no marking (as expected), the grammatical indirect object is marked (as expected), only the first is the recipient of the action and the second is the executor. I wonder if an analogical reversal occurs in ergative-absolutive languages.
Well...not quite. First, change "some" to "all" in the first sentence. The very definition of a passive is promoting an object to subject position. It should be _shocking_ if the logical object of a passive construction is _not_ treated as a grammatical subject, since that's the very definition of what a passive is. Specifically, what's happening is the verb is changing from transitive to intransitive, with its sole argument being the raised object of a formerly transitive sentence. So unless S is marked differently, it should have the marking S would. Note also that the demoted agent is always optional. In effect, it's no longer an argument of the verb (or no more so than something like "the table" in the expression "on the table" which, presumably, could be added to every sentence, whether it makes sense or not). Passives generally come into being to help link clauses in discourse. So, for example, if you start talking about something that's the object of your first sentence, but it continues to be what you're talking about, you passivize the verbs to make it the subject. Ergative-absolutive languages have an analog to this called the antipassive, but that's a separate video. Some day!
English can also exhibit ergativity in sentences like "The pasta is cooking". Here, the 'S' in the sentence correlates to the 'P' in the transitive version: "I am cooking the pasta". I love your work. I created a conlang for my linguistics honor's thesis in university and it was a split-ergative language. High Valyrian is a language i'm DYING to learn.
Something that I especially like is to make a difference between active and passive subjects : Use two cases, a sort of nominative/ergative and a sort of accusative/absolutive. It works the same in transitive clauses. But in intransitive ones, the subject can be nominative/ergative if the verb is active (work, go) or accusative/absolutive if the subject experiences the action without making it. (die, sleep) An interesting question comes then : which verbs must be considered as active or passive ?
David. I don't know if you have made a video for this, or talked about it in detail, but: Could you make a video on language variants? Taking for example the situation of the language of french - how it is spoken in Canada as opposed to France.
Thank you sooooo much!!! Such a great, yet simple explanation! I've tried to understand the erg-abs logic for so long now... :D and you explained it in less than 15 minutes
If you want to get a feel for why Ergativity is so natural, check out the "anti-causative" verbs we have in English: I broke the the window. The window broke (?because I broke it). The Germans are sinking many submarines. Many submarines are sinking (?because the Germans are sinking them). I'm about to close the door. The door is about to close (?because I'm about to close it). Notice how the same noun, doing the same thing, is the subject of the intransitive verb but the object of the transitive form. If these verbs were marked with an ergative-absolutive alignment, the same noun would be marked the same way. This type of verb is apparently one of the main ideosyncrasies of European languages, and I don't think it's a necessary part of nominative-accusative languages. (I think they're called anti-causatives because the transitive form is actually the original; maybe zero-derivation the other way is more common.) In fact, you can see that most transitive verbs do NOT follow this pattern and must be put in passive voice to become intransitive: I ate the sushi. The sushi was eaten (?by me). Flowers kill fish. Fish are killed (?by flowers). He will turn the oceans into blood. The oceans will be turned into blood (?by him). In any case, however, I think they do provide some insight into why both alignments, as well as active-stative split-ergativity (I think all anti-causatives are semantically passive in their intransitive forms.) are natural, even if they seem strange to us at first.
I got it!!!Thank you!!!I have one more question: do you mean only in ergative-absolutive language can we talk about ergative-absolutive case? or we can talk about this marking strategy in for example English? P.S.My flowers were often devoured by my birds, not fish. Yes, I use WERE because those flowers were eaten up:(
All this talk about number of arguments made me think about arity in Erlang. With that context, the talk about marking the arguments reminded me of method call notation vs. function call notation. Herb Sutter's N4165 proposal then seems closely related.
Basque and Georgian do this, and to indicate the indirect object, the Dative Case is used. not to be confused with the Allative. Arabic defines Intransitivity with SVO and Transitivity with VSO
Can't believe u have a RUclips channel!! Glad I found it...totally in love with ur book...Still find it hard to believe that Dothraki is a conlang seemed like a natural lang...Big fan here..
I'm reading your book and it's amazing! Not going to create a conlang probably, but very interesting to read as a linguistica student. I was wondering, in the sentence "the fish eats", is "the fish" the subject or agent? "Eat" is a transitive verb, but there's no subject here. Also, would verbs in ergative languages inflect depending on the patient/subject instead of agent?
I think I understand ergative now, but what happens when you have an indirect object? -- Also, in the example, where the girl hugged the fish nd danced, to me it seems like there could be a reflexive or mutual quality to it that might need to be shown in the case markers somehow, or a preposition or maybe as a property of the verb. That is, the girl and the fish dance with each other, they dance together, the fish also dances with the girl. Er, though who's the lead might factor in. Maybe the girl leads and the fish follows, unless it's a very happy dancing fish, in which case...OK, yeah, I think I might be over-analyzing a tad. ;) In a typical ergative setup, that wouldn't relate to mutual / reflexive or a "with" situation, which I'd think would be different in grammatical structure. Apologies, since your example intended subject-direct object / agent-patient accusative. I'm just curious how the mutuality would be handled.
My (As of 06/25/16)wife bought me a copy of your book for my birthday(A month prior to our wedding) and I have nearly read it all so far. Besides my "Hebrew" and "Latin for Dummies" books and my "Japanese the Manga Way" book yours is one of the only books I've taken ANY interest in reading in the past like, ten years. Before she got me all of these in May, I was busy trying desperately to keep my mind occupied with my old beat up Nahuatl dictionary. Your book has given me quite a few ideas on where to take my conlangs, and how to rework a few of them. And provided my wife with NONSTOP annoyance as a woman who has absolutely no interest in languages and married a man OBSESSED with language. Thanks again for simply being a hero for linguists everywhere, and uh, Don't Forget To Be Awesome. :D
Ha, at least your wife is a linguist. Mines a psychologist, to whom language learning is as onions are to you. Only kinda kidding, she finds it fundamentally incomprehensible, but much like your wife she loves that I love it. (Also she busted up laughing when I shouted, "DAVID PETERSON RESPONDED"[again, I'm a huge fan, no self deprecating joke intended{sorry if I keep gushing, I'm trying not to... lol}])
Hi. I've been working on a conlang. Its grammar models information flow, pretty much exactly like a Message Sequence Diagram. In the language, objects of a verb are not really marked. They agglutinate to the verb they belong to. And there's no marking to differentiate a subject (agent) from a direct object (patient). I had been calling both agent and patient "agents" when writing my ideas down, not being aware of nom-acc and ergat terminology. So what have I done here? In my conlang, a sentence might be (with English words), Alice gives-key to Bob gives-key to Charlie opens-using-key Lock. Here Alice is definitely an agent, and the lock is definitely a patient. but Bob and Charlie are both agent and patient. In English you can make this fully nom-acc by making three sentences. Alice gives-key Bob. Bob gives-key Charlie. Charlie uses-key lock. But my language DOESN'T DO THAT. So what type is my grammar? I have no affixive marking and all patients are also agents. What's this called?
Peter, you say it's a coinflip whether a language uses this one or that one, but no language is ergative all the way through, while there are plenty of languages which are accusative all the way through. Maybe word order plays into it, but word order itself is distributed unevenly. Possibly so for a very good reason: UID, information density. There are some theories better known than UID as well. Ergativity is cool, but it's not close as common as you make it out to be.
Does ergativity regularly coincide with other language features, like an unusual word order or verb structure? Also does it occur in all language types or only in specific ones (e.g. agglutinative languages)?
Ergativity can occur petty much everywhere on the spectrum but often ergative languages are agglutinative. The one important feature that comes with ergative languages is the antipassive, which is basically, like the name states, the opposite of the passive in accusative languages. For example, in English we would have "I see the dog." in the active, if we passivize it we'd have "The dog is seen (by me).", so we remove the agent and promote the patient to the the subject of an intransitive clause. The antipassive works by removing the patient instead of the agent and the agent becomes the subject of an intransitive clause. So we'd have something like "I see (the dog).", where the patient is implied through some antipassive construction, like the agent is implied in the passive, but left out. On a side note Tripartite languages usually have both passive and antipassive.
Split-ergative languages like Hindi don't have an antipassive. This is because ergative constructions there actually arise from old passive constructions (because the new past or perfect tense arose from a present tense passive construction). Only homegrown ergative languages have antipassives.
It's called an antipassive, and I just didn't get to it in this video. It does the opposite thing a passive does, but the outcome is the same: the argument that ordinarily wouldn't be assumed is now assumed.
I've sent you a question by mail but I want to generalize it for a video maybe: How do I trinscribe non naturalistic sound systems? The human vocal track can produce alot more sounds than are shown on the API. The best exanple is a growl, used mostly in heavy metal, its a vibration of the diaphragma that produces a growl like sound, and it does not upier in the IPA. Another question is about scripts: Archaic spelling. when you invent a writing system for a conlang, do you take into acount crazy spelling like Englishes (as the most extream example) or Japanese (as an even more extream example), or do you just transcribe the words phonaticly.
The IPA can transcribe growls, or pretty much anything that happens in the mouth/throat. If it happens somewhere else, you need a different transcription system. If one doesn't exist, you have to invent it. For the second question, check out my presentation on the Castithan writing system at LCC5: ruclips.net/video/rOdm0z8xBmc/видео.html
I can see why marking s and a or s and p might be a good idea, but marking all of them doesn't seem to have any real benefit. In SA marking you carry the S for the next verb, like the example you gave "the girl danced", in the SP marking you carry P, "the fish danced". But I can't see any logic in marking all of them, what carries to the next verb? Btw, Am I right to assume that SA marking is active and SP is passive?
On the active, passive part, no. In the way you're probbaly used to active & passive wording is found in nomitive-accustive languages only ( eg S & A group together). Active describes transitve & ditransitive ( and all other verbs that take more than one agrument), that states the A and the P in the sentence eg. I give you the book. Passivity describes when we take the A in the sentence away and yet still try to tell some one the action that took place eg The book was given to you.
+Zarsla thanks. It's kinda a weird way how the second example works, the fish being the "center" of the sentence, so I thought that things were acting upon it in a passive way (the girl hugging it) and that's why it was carried to the next bit in a active way(the fish dancing).
As a note, I specifically didn't talk about passives or antipassives in this video, because I thought it was a little complex (better to fully understand ergativity before discussing passive vs. antipassive). Regarding your second comment, the reason the fish is carried over in the ergative example is _JUST_ because of the marking. Don't think about the semantics there. It's just that the verb assumes the absolutive argument (the unmarked argument in the specific example I gave) is going to be the sole argument of an intransitive verb when no overt argument is listed.
Oh, but it's also fine to mark all three (or to leave one unmarked and mark two). In that case, whatever the unmarked one is will probably carry over. My guess is it'd probably be the subject (A).
My conlang has a dative case..and 3 other noun cases that don't exist in Modern English but exists in many Philippine languages. Dative case is for telling a noun to talk about the indirect object.
This definitely helps with my understanding of ergativity, though it still is a relatively strange concept since I don't speak any languages that utilize this function. I am thinking about creating an ergative absolutive language once i'm done with the one i'm currently working on, and I gain a greater understanding of Ergativity as a concept.
Might a reason for A-P alignment be to distinguish between transitive and intransitive verbs with the same root? Like, luri masam might mean the girl said, whereas lurik masam would mean the girl told.
Are there any existing languages that have 0-argument verbs? I'm thinking of something like instead of saying "it is raining", you just say "rains". The action is happening without being done by or to anything.
Wow-years later, RUclips recommended this again and didn't show if I had "liked" it before. (1) How is the ergative Agent Verb Patient (or Patient Verb Agent) different from the passive voice, Object Verb (Passive) Subject ? This, how is "The dolphin (agent) saw the boat (patient)." different from "The boat (patient) was seen by the dolphin (agent)." except in the verb form and the addition of the preposition "by" in English, and that the English flips the agent / patient word order? I mean, looking at the two, if you had case markers, they would be identical or almost so. What am I missing that would distinguish an ergative versus a passive-accusative sentence (or clause or phrase) in an ergative language? (2) How does an ergative language deal with reflexive verb constructions? Does it lump them in with intransitive verb constructions, or does it have another marking or verb / noun forms? Basically, continuing my questions from a few years ago.
this video was great help to a layman like me -thanks. I found reference to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austronesian_alignment on the wikipedia. Wondering if you could do a video explaining that variation. Looks interesting as I'm imagining the potential cultural impact of such langues and what fun might be hand with such in a secondary world.
So for first time inflection of a verb what is better? Nom/Acc function or Ergative/Absolute or Oblique function ? Both in speech will be work together in times?
When you gave the example 'the girl hugged the fish and danced'...is there a way to tell whether she continued to hug the fish while she danced, or just hugged it, then stopped hugging it, then danced?
In that particular example, I imagined the hugging and dancing as separate things, with the hugging ending before the dancing began. Certainly a language _could_ make that distinction, and I wouldn't be surprised if one did.
What about when you take the patient argument out of a transitive verb? Like if you were to say "I eat/I am eating" instead of "I eat fish/I am eating fish"? Would you mark it as a subject or as an agent? Also if you were to have a sentence like "I sleep on the bed," would that still consider "I" to be the subject or would it be something else because technically something is happening to the bed?
In "I sleep on the bed", "on the bed" is an adjunct. The core is still "I sleep", so it's still intransitive, and "I" is still the subject. As for the first, in an ergative language, this is called an antipassive, and I didn't get into them in this video. In effect, though, you change the verb morphology, a transitive verb becomes intransitive, and the ergative argument becomes absolutive (becomes the S argument), with the patient removed.
Depends where the split is. In something like Hindi, it's based on tense, so it's not really an issue (i.e. not often you have a sentence like "I walked the dog and dance", switching tenses without reintroducing the subject). If it's based on animacy, my feeling is you probably have to reintroduce the subject. After all, that's the default: If it just won't work, or the result is infelicitous, you just make it more explicit.
Nominative-accusative languages are far more common than ergative-absolutive ones. SO languages (SOV, SVO, OSV) are also extremely more common than OS languages. Is there any relationship between those things? For me it is quite intuitive that languages that leave the agent unmarked would see it as far more important than the patient, so it would make sense to introduce the agent first and only then patient (and also because of a natural emphasis on the agent). But, by using this same logic, I would deduce that ergative-absolutive languages tend to be OS, but it is not the case.
Yes, I said this (or wrote this on the screen) later in the video. That said, I'm not sure about the co-occurrence of ergativity with OS. I'm sure that study has been done, but I'm not aware of any specific stats on it. I think it's a good intuition, though.
Honestly, the only viable one is VOS, that I've seen (the Malagasy word order). Everything else...I don't know. New information usually comes at the end, and the object is usually the new information. ASL is OVS most of the time, but there it's almost like it's SOV with a dropped subject and a deemphatic copy pronoun of the subject at the end. You rarely see OVS when the subject is a full NP.
Also, I knew that you would choose -k as the ergative suffix :D For some weird reason, Sumerian uses -ak and Basque has -ek for ergative, and those are the only two ergative where I know the suffixes. Guess that's the reason you used it, too.
are you sure sumerian uses -ak to mark ergative? actually I knew -ak is used to mark the genitive and -e is used to mark the ergative! I could be wrong though. if you have any good font that says otherwise i'd be glad to read it!
One reason might be that the "K" sound in Paleo-Hebrew was depicted as a hand/palm symbol. It might have been associated with working, doing some action & stuff like that (being the agent, the mover).
One thing to mention as well is the fact that nearly all reactive languages are sov, or some other word order in which the verb follows the absolutive argument. I the woman sees The woman runs I the woman sees and runs
That was clear and informative. I was wondering if you are interested in comparative linguistics or how languages evolve . It would be highly appreciated ti do some videos about such topics
What person are proper nouns and noun phrases? For example, in a sentence like "I saw John"? would we consider John to be in 3rd person or something else? ... Im asking this because im making a conlang that's ergative in the past tense, and my verbs mark person, and as far as I know, verbs in ergative languages match the absolutive patient, so i need to know which person to use with John.
As I understand it, Japanese isn't exactly nominative/accusative. The way it was explained to me, the case marker 'wo' denotes that the verb affects the object in some meaningful way. For example, you would say 'watashi ga nihongo ga wakararemasu', not 'watashi ga nihongo wo wakararemasu', since your understanding the language does nothing to the language itself.
Japanese is definitely nominative-accusative. It just also has a topic marker, _wa_. Topic is something different from all this that's best described separately. If _wa_ isn't used, the facts of Japanese are fairly straightforward: Watashi ga nemashita. "I slept." Watashi go sushi o tabemashita. "I ate the sushi." In fact, even with _wa_, it's the same (and more natural): Watashi wa nemashita. "I slept." Watashi wa sushi o tabemashita. "I ate the sushi." Clear nominative-accusative pattern. The topic marker is tangential to the accusativity.
+David Peterson While we're on the subject of Japanese case markers, I have another suggestion: maybe you could make a video about the trigger/topic case somewhere down the line? It's something a lot of western languages don't have, so it's probably something a lot of conlangers would never even consider, that I feel can open up a lot of new syntactic options.
I actually _just_ commented on this in another comment thread! I gave two links there that go over some of it, but yeah, some day I'll do a video on that.
"Remember you have to old on to that idea that enacting some sort of action makes you at least slightly different than being the sole participant of an event" I wish there was a better way to call this system other than "morphosyntactic alignment". I don't know why would such a complicated phrase would be used to describe it when it seems like all this is marking is who does what during an action, like the difference between "WHO did what" and "who did WHAT".
I ee I made a mistake in my conlang. I wanted to make it naturalistic, but I used an accusative alighment but had patients carry over from phrase to phrase. Now I'll have to create a history of shifting from ergative to absolutive, which suggests a vestige in irregular forms.
And how a lonely agent is treated then? Like, say, we can say "I have done the work" or "I have done". Is the "I" agent in both cases or is it subject in the second one?
+David Peterson Actually, I want to create a tripartite language and I hoped I'd find some information in the video. How "he" should be treated in these these two cases? Equally or not? Or is it up to me and my language?
FueganTV It's up to you, but tripartite means that "he" will be in the ergative if it's the agent of a transitive verb, absolutive if it's the patient of a transitive verb, and the nominative if it's the subject of an intransitive verb. That's how tripartite systems work.
Ok…, what if you have neither transitivity or markings on neither subject, agent or patient? Depisq fredaurmi - The fish slept Depisq fre vy fredaurmi - The fish made you sleep Depisq defleu frejezi - The fish ate the flower Defleu depisq frejezi - The fish ate the flower (as an inanimate object, the flower cannot be the agent of the sentence) Defleu, ani depisq frejezi - The flower ate the fish (here an inanimate object is marked as being agent of the sentence) Defamin freqeulli depisq i fami/ani frezelebri - The girl hugged the fish and [she/it] celebrated (note SVO because both nouns are animate objects)
Mmh, actually, your language seems accusative still or at least since it's a non casual language it look more like one (English has no marking for the accusative case and is still a accusative language). Though your last sentence seems to indicate it tends more toward a kind of tripartite language since you cannot carry the subject through the sentence. To really have no distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs, you must do so that verbs like sleep or stand can have an object/patient like eat, for example (let's say that daurnini is a word for 'nap/siesta', and oqmo 'night' and apotri 'stand (past)') : Depisq fredaurmi daurnini - the fish had a nap (lit. the fish slept a nap) Depisq fredaumi oqmo - the fish slept this night / all the night (lit. the fish slept the night und. he slept it) Depisq apotri oqmo - the fish stood this night / all the night (lit. the fish stood the night) I say that cause your sentence seems indicate that 'fre' is a preposition or verb to mean 'made someone do something', if it's so, it's not really different than the prefix 'en-' in french (which has distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs) : Je dors - I sleep J'endors le bébé - I make the baby sleep The only difference in your language is that you can do it with all the intransitive verbs. If 'fredaurmi' need the detachment 'fre' to become transitive then it stays inherently intransitive. To truly have no distinctions between transitive and intransitive verbs, you need to have what i show you in your language (or something similar). However, it would just suppress the inherence of transitivity of a verb. A verb is now 'softwired' to be transitive or intransitive instead of being 'hardwired' to do so. It just that a verb is transitive or intransitive according to the context : Depisq fredaurmi : intransitive Depisq fredaurmi oqmo : transitive Depisq defleu frejezi : transitive Depisq defleu : intransitive with in bonus the possibility to construct inductive sentence like this (if i understood correctly) : Depisq a vy apotri - The fish made you stand Vy de depisq defleu - You made the fish eat And if you implement what i proposed you, here you can even do something like that : Fre depisq oqmo fredaurmi, ani depisq frejezi - The flower made the fish sleep this night/all night (And i would advice you that in the 'inanimate agent phrase', you may use a pronoun for the animate patient, so the sentence is a lil shorter :) ) The thing with the animate/inanimate is completely separated from the ergative/accusative question. Could you translate the following sentences : I give a flower to the fish the flower is eaten the fish is eaten the flower is eaten by the fish the fish is hurt by the flower The fish is given a flower by me A flower is given to the fish by me So we can see the things clearer ? (And i ask you all those question to help you ^^)
tonio103683 Sure I'll translate a few sentences for you, however, the passive voice is not possible in Delang. A few notes, - fre is the past tense particle (gro is the future, no present) - andaurnin means a nap - defeleu mean the flower - jezi means eating (no infinitive) Your translation examples Depisq andaurnin fredaurmi - The fish had a nap Depisq fredaurmi allnyqt - The fish slept the whole night (nyqt is here used as an adverb) Depisq frestaui allnyqt - The fish stood the whole night Az daurmi - I am sleeping Az gro departaunan daurmi - I make the baby sleep (note future particle, but present tense verb) Defleu, ani fre depisq fredaurmi allnyqt, i ani depisq frejezi - The flower made the fish sleep all night, and it ate the fish Your translation requests: Az aunj depisq anfleu - I (give) a flower to the fish (S-preposition-DO-IO-verb dropped) ? jezi defleu - ? is eating the flower (SVO) ? jezi depisq - ? is eating the fish (SVO) Depisq jezi defleu - The fish is eating the flower (SVO) Defleu, ani suvxi depisq - The flower is suffering the fish (inanimate object marked as agent, SVO) Az aunj depisq anfleu (for both of the last two, which is identical to the first sentence) I know that the point you are trying to make is that there is limitations to this approach. Such a language won't support passive voice, and I am aware of that. I alway reinterpret passive voice sentences into active voice when translating into Delang.
Mmh does 'andaurnin' is an adverb ? cause so you totally have a difference between transitive and intransitive verbs and your language is accusative or non marked tripartite. Also induction and accusation is not the same thing. You should be careful with that. Also how do you would say 'The flower is making the fish sleep' ? Mmh not having passive verbs is not a problem , to translate 'The flower is eaten', you could easily do it through the use of a neutral or impersonal pronoun like 'Ani jezi defleu' 'It/One is eating the flower' (German if i remember is quite found of it). or by pure absence of pronouns could work too (since your language loves to drop verbs it could also drop the subject probably). You could imagine a protolanguage without transitivity. Actions are just expressed through juxtaposing of two arguments (like baby language): Aom-fire/burning mi-me/being -ni plural nyam-food/eating gulp-prey/devour -on- being able -ok being victim of kakan-lion/danger sasa-fleeing/legs ayan-pain/hurt Mi aom. Aom aom. Nyam Aom. Mi nyam. I set the fire. The fire burn. Food is cooked. I eat. That convey the idea 'I cook the food and eat it' Kakan-ni ! Kakan-ni ! mi-ni sassa ! Kakan-ni gulp-on ! Lions ! Danger ! we flee ! Lions can devour ! There's lions ! It's dangerous ! We must flee cause lions can devour us. Gulp-sasa-on-ni gulp-ok The preys that can flee are victim of devoration Even if prey can flee, they can be devoured (See here no transitivity, but a kind of passive voice still exist). Myaom-ok ayan-ok Me, the victim of hurt is victim of burning I'm hurt/burnt by the fire The language can already have a complex suffixing and all, but as soon as you have something like a subject and an object, then you have transitivity. As soon as you have a language that can do : Mi nyam gulpsasa - I eat prey legs You have transitivity at play. So Delang is no exception it seems.
tonio103683 'Andaurnin' is a noun. Defleu gro depisq daurmi - The is making the fish sleep Delang drops subject also, but much less frequently than dropping verb.
Was this what you meant by "accusative langauges doing funny stuff"? Çiçek balık yedi. Çiçek balığı yedi. The first sentence uses the word "balık"(fish) with no suffixes and relies on the order of the words to convey the functions of the words. The meaning roughly translates to "The flower ate fish" but it can also mean "The flower ate a fish" or even "The flower ate multiple fish". The second sentence uses the more common accusative and since every word is marked now, the order of the words becomes irrelevant and can be altered to emphasize any of the three words. The meaning, unsurprisingly, translates to "The flower ate the fish", pointing at a particular fish. So, Turkish makes up for its lack of the definite article by using the absolute case to mark the specificity of an object and looking like an ergative language for a very short time. Also, I'd love to see you do a video on evidentiality. We only use 2 case markers for past events when marking evidentiality in Turkish (and we cannot form a past-tense sentence without using at least one), but I know there are languages which have specific ways of marking which of your five senses aided in your inference or whether you've heard it from someone and I think it'd be interesting to learn about them.
Yeah, this is always a tough thing for learners. "I went to the trouble of learning this durn accusative case, and now you're telling me not to use it?!" lol I'll do a video on evidentiality, but only after discussing it with Sylvia Sotomayor, who's become the queen of evidentiality in conlanging.
I remember hearing/reading something about an Austronesian alignment system; will you ever cover that? I think I remember you once saying that Hawaiian is (one of) your favorite language(s), so I don't see why you wouldn't.
Eventually... Hawaiian doesn't participate, though (Hawaiian's pretty straightforward; just one class of verbs called _loa'a_ verbs that act a little funny, but nothing like the Philippine languages). In the meantime, check out this post: dedalvs.tumblr.com/post/146559512547/in-your-book-you-said-that-it-is-your-strong And this one: en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Talk:Conlang/Advanced/Grammar/Alignment/Trigger
Hawaiian doesn't use Austronesian alignment? Weird. I wonder why that is? Do languages often change alignment systems? Anywho, a bit off-topic, but do you know any good, up-to-date, and hopefully free resources on learning Hawaiian? I'd like to get to that eventually (third on my list of natlangs to learn after French and Breton).
Nah, you're thinking of it wrong. More like Austronesian started out a certain way, then it split, then the languages evolved, then the Philippine languages independently evolved a unique alignment system using its various passives and applicatives. As for free resources, none that I've used (I have a ton of print resources), but these all look promising: wehewehe.org/ oleloonline.com/ www.olelo.hawaii.edu/
I see. But, it's still the case then that a language can change alignment systems over time. It's just that Proto-Austronesian was the one and then certain daughters get the Austronesian system. I blame the name for the confusion. :P Thanks for the links, btw. I'd buy resources if I could but that requires employment, which has been difficult for me to find. One last thing: I can read an IPA chart and pronounce everything from bilabial to uvular without a bit of trouble and then read some pharyngeal. I'm not sure, however, I can distinguish /#?V/ and /#V/. I have a glottal stop in my English, but I don't know if I can do it initially and have no way of telling if I can. The most likely place to find native Hawaiian speakers who could tell me whether or not I can are separate from me due to an ocean, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Contrast that with French, where I could drive a few hours and find native (non-Parisian, granted) French speakers that could help me to some extent. Anyways, are there any sites where people just put recordings of there voice in another language for native speakers to judge? Or is there any way in general to tell?
Super easy to tell in Hawaiian, because, remember, when people are speaking, it's not in isolated words. Thus it's as easy to hear /#ʔV/ as it is /VʔV/. Even if the very first word of a sentence starts with a glottal stop, you'll figure out what it's supposed to be by the end of the sentence. Anyway, easiest way to pronounce [#ʔV] is to hold your breath and then start saying a vowel. The catch at the beginning is the glottal stop.
just a question I have been wondering, how realistic is it to dream of becoming a professional language creator for media as you are. Do you think the demand will increase as more shows are starting to do it and it could become a sort of extremely rare profession. What are your thoughts on that topic?
I think it's fairly unrealistic, I'm afraid. :( The number of jobs are increasing from, say, 1 every 5 years, to 3 every year. That's a HUGE increase, but it's still a drop in the bucket, given that one person is capable of doing 3 jobs in a year. Plus you have to factor in the fact that as shows like these garner more attention, it raises awareness about language creation, which leads to more language creators. So while there's an increase in jobs, there's also an increase in the job pool-likely a larger one, percentagewise. Add to that the fact that Hollywood prefers to work with people they know, AND there's no way to get discovered, and, well, the future does not look rosy. But things may change as the years go on. The best thing one can do is continually work on one's own languages and try to find artists/writers who are trying to break in. Then you can add your language work to their work, and if they break in, you may break in with them. Long odds, but odds, nonetheless.
Or you can simply get lucky - which is usually the case with those in business :q We know their success stories because it was _them_ who got lucky instead of someone else. We don't hear success stories from those who didn't get lucky, right? :J Another important ingredient is connections. The more people in the industry you know (or rather they know about _you_ ), the bigger the chance you get lucky ;)
A lot of conlangers have employed systems like this, and gone further with what's called a split-S system. A split-S system is where there are four markings total-two different ones for S. The difference is whether the verb has an argument that's more A like or more S like. For example, something like "sleep" would have an S-like S argument, while a verb like "whistle" would have an A-like S argument. Some do this by using either S or A marking with an intransitive verb; some do it by creating a new A-like S marking. But, yes, you can do this. I'm not sure if there's a natlang that does it consistently, though.
@@Dedalvs My language, Alfeme, uses a Fluid-S (active/stative) system, wherein some verbs differ in meaning depending on whether the subject is being active in it or passive/stative. For example, the verb "lixan" means "I am teaching," whereas "loxan" means "I know," as in this culture they see teaching as an active form of knowing. Similar to this, the preterite form "lixanvi" means "I learned" whereas "loxanvi" means "I found out." Technically, the objective form for these verbs is an oblique, not an absolutive or a dative as nouns are. In ditransitive verbs, the same absolutive form is used for dative constructions.
Absolutely. This is how: (1) Kama dori. "The boy is dancing." (2) Tala meli kama. "The girl sees the boy." (3) Kama meli tala. "The boy sees the girl." (4) Tala meli kama so dori. "The girl sees the boy and (the boy) dances." (5) Kama meli tala so dori. "The boy sees the girl and (the girl) dances." No marking, but undeniably ergative-absolutive.
David Peterson but then, how would we differenciate it from the nom-acc alignment? Could we analyze these examples in nom-acc as well? This that there is no marking whatsoever, depending on how we think it, it could be either which, no?
David Peterson right, I see. Then, besides that, ignoring the sentences 4 and 5, there would be no way to distinguish between nom-acc versus erg-abs, right?
I just rediscovered the term "theta grid". That's what you call the exact set of arguments a verb requires in terms of thematic roles. Thematic roles are semantic (based on meaning), rather than syntactic, though.
I've been confused to the point of frustration about ergativity since I first learned about it, but it is precisely due to that frustration that it is now one of my absolute favourite things about linguistics. Also, do you know if it's possible for a language to have no intransitive verbs/clauses? Or at least very very rarely? Like, for instance, in one of my conlangs (maybe, I might change this for other reasons, e.g., the conlang's actual alignment) you can't say "I sleep". I is "Ru" and "sleep", a noun, is "Mutitvi". You have to say "Ru lamu mutitvi", where, in other cases "lamu" means "have", and in this case it's " to experience". So, it would be "I experience sleep". Is that a system that could exist in some form in the real world? And, if so, what alignment would that even be? Transitive?? An entirely new hypothetical system (lmao probably not)? Ich habe kein Idee.
Nah, but there are arguments I've seen to suggest certain languages don't have _transitive_ verbs, only intransitive. Anyway, no, that's not a new alignment system; it'd just be a language that only has transitive verbs.
Eh, alright. I've already decided to make that conlang a tripartite language, with the Agent and Patient declining by word order and the Subject getting a case marking. Thanks anyway!
Alexei Soltis that sounds pretty weird. A special affix for S but an isolating structure for transitive verbs? Is there any other language that uses such a system?
I talked about this system in my Ergativity Reference Guide here: dedalvs.com/notes/ergativity.php#7p0 I called it Unitive-Duative. I can think of a way to gin one up diachronically, but it's a one in a million shot. I wouldn't expect to find one in the wild.
I am a noob to creating languages, and I just have to say.... I don't understand this at all. whats the point in having either of these. why do you need to mark the do-er with an affix, or why do you need to mark the one done to with an affix? why cant you just have it with context? Is what I'm saying even making sense? do I understand this at all? this is the struggle of trying to make a language while knowing an ungodly low amount of linguistics... I'm a freshman in high school like Jesus christ I have no idea what he's talking about and it just makes me upset cause I want to know but I don't know can somebody help me
Nathan gave a good response, so just do the tl;dr version: There's no point to anything in language, most of the time. Lots of stuff language does you can do, but also you don't have to. Marking participants explicitly in a sentence is one of those things.
Of course there IS a point in language to do things! The first and most important one being: to communicate information. Languages are created to facilitate communicating information. E.g. some words become shorter with time if they are used more frequently. Some words merge together when they are used together very often. Even things like different endings of words or different word orders evolve to convey some information or to let us distinguish some edge cases better. It's just that different languages use different techniques to achieve these goals. Where English uses the word order to distinguish between the agent and the patient, other languages use grammatical case and their endings for the same, so that they could change the word order to something more efficient in conveying information (e.g. they can put more important words first). Languages that can't do that usually come up with some other ways to work around it, such as the passive voice. There's always a reason behind every rule in a language, one just needs to actively look for it and try to understand how does it work and why does it work that way.
Yes. All that matters is that they are different. They may both be marked, or only one of them may be marked, or it may not be be obvious which is marked (say if the difference if is a vowel shift or tone shift or consonant mutation or something, or*). That being said marked absolutive is extremely rare. The world atlas of language structures study I link to below only had one in their sample. They had 6 marked nominative cases, the difference is more than can be accounted for by the fact that they had more total Nom-Acc languages than Erg-Abs ones. wals.info/chapter/98 * Also, although this is often discussed in terms of morphological case marking, there are many other levels if language structure where this difference arises. For example, English has nom-acc syntax in a few obvious ways. One is the coordination-anaphora thing he mentioned in the video ("who danced"), the other is our word order: SV or AVP Nominative=before-the-verb Accusative=after-the-verb This is case marking by word order.** If you look back at the video, you will see that all his examples, even the ones with Erg-Abs case suffixes followed English word order. If this language has fixed word order, then we would have to say that it has Erg-Abs alignment in morphology (in simple clauses at least), and apparently also in the coordibation-anaphora thing, but Nom-Acc alignment in word order. This sort of thing where a language is Nom-Acc in some ways or in some situations and Erg-Abs in others is very common in Erg-Abs languages. In fact, oddly enough, apparently there's no such thing as a language that's known to be totally Erg-Abs in all areas of syntax and morphology, even though (I think) many or most Nom-Acc languages apparently are. At least, that's what I've been told by people who were probably linguists is true the way languages have been analyzed. (I'm always skeptical about claims about "all languages" or "no language", especially when there's obvious reason why, as in this case.) ** Interesting to note is that word order is neither alignment in verb-final and verb-initial languages because intransitive sentences would be the same either way: SV APV (or PAV, but I think that's very rare.) VS VAP or VPA In any of these situations, you can either interpret the other argumant as being added between the other two or as being added on the outside of the whole thing.
Despite my previous comment, i will have to disagree with you, i've noticed that erg-abs construction is somehow more frequent. nom-acc is more popular because indoeuropean languages have spread all over the globe, but if we exclude the "forced" indoeuropean languages for a while, we would see that most indigenous languages tend to have an erg-abs construction. that's my observations
your observations are wrong... Only around 30% of the world's languages are primarily ergative and almost (if not all) of those show some kind of accusativity. Also you can't just ignore an entire language family because it doesn't fit your hypothesis
The agent of a transitive verb would have the ergative case while the patient would have the accusative and the one argument of an intransitive would be the absolutive.
See below (or some other comment; can't remember if it's above or below this) where I talked about Split-S languages. In Split-S languages, no; in regular ergative languages, yes, because it doesn't care about the semantics, just the grammatical role. In fact, whether or not these arguments are treated differently is the factor that distinguishes Split-S languages from regular ergative languages.
A reflexive marker would make sense in a language where the grammar requires an object in every sentence. "I sleep" isn't a complete sentence, so requires an empty object; to become "I sleep self". I kick self: Onam pevi. I kick myself: On ma pevi. I wouldn't call it a monster raving lunatic marker. A language has its own internal logic. It is possible, as the language ages that it will eventually drop the ending.
I heard about ergativity and naturally the first thing to do was to open the wikipedia article. I read the first two sentences and was like 'wtf is this?!, let me check RUclips, there must be some smart guy there who explains that in human language' and hopefully there was. I really liked the vid and being a language geek myself I instantly subscribed to your channel and I'm about to watch your other videos in a minute. BTW you are the guy who created Valyrian and Dothraki, right? I greatly admire your work, didn't know you have a RUclips channel but rest assured that you have a loyal fan here (y) (y) (y), keep up the good work and go on making more videos and languages, we really admire them!
Same here :J I don't know who writes those Wikipedia articles, but we have to kill them immediately to save humanity's sane minds :q
Hopefully there was isn't correct
@@bonbonpony but wikipedia has to be wikipedialike
Wikipedia is very jargon heavy, especially in its opening paragraphs. That can make it super fast to look stuff up if you already know the field's jargon (no pesky explanations you don't need), but it's super slow if you don't know the jargon.
6:05: "The flower devoured the fish... somehow" - a Neptune Fish Trap flower.
LOL I love it!
Thank you :v
David Peterson ok, I need to make a plant that hunts fish in my fantasy world
Easy, an aquatic meat eating plant.
Im imagining an underwater plant that looks like coral or an anemone. It has another lure, like smell or something that looks like food. Would be similar to a Venus fly trap.
In the example at 10:25 I remembered that ergative language may be useful to simplify sentences in which the intransitive clause is a natural direct consequence of the action of the transitive one (like a medial voice). For example, "the girl slammed the door and closed.". This sentence would seem very weird in English, but for an ergative language it would make pretty much sense. In the example at 10:25, dancing is not a natural direct consequence of hugging, but rather a further action done immediately after it.
Pssh... Maybe not a natural direct consequence for _you_. But yes, that door closing example is a good one! Thanks!
Today's my birthday, and I am getting your book!!!! I'm so excited!
~:D If I'm ever in the same area as you, I'll sign it!
I bought it form iTunes. Will read it in the airplane to Canada tomorrow. "I is so excites!"
So glad this channel exists. I've seen this explained multiple times in my conlang group, but could never wrap my head around what the terms ultimately meant for usage. You actually explain things in an awesomely straightforward manner, and it's crazy helpful. I appreciate your book for the same reason. Now when I see posts about these points I'll actually know what I'm looking at. :)
I'd have loved if you had something about the antipassive voice, but I guess that would just make things very convoluted :)
Separate episode (on valence-changing operations).
I'd been confused about this topic, but you make it sound so simple! Thank you, I understand it now. :-)
Hey, where's split ergativity? Antipassive???
Austronesian too!
he explains anti passive on the link in the description.
King Keegster omg it's you! Hi, it's SOA
@@parthiancapitalist2733 it can be SAP or SAO they’re just two different notations.
> Kirik logum ??? niwa ?? su ?? veyam
The last example is the start of an explanation why ergative languages bother with an antipassive voice.
Consider this
> The girl hugged the fish and it danced.
"Fish" is associated with both verbs but it has a different role - exactly the same problem. So we can either use a pronoun (etc. "deixis") or we can do something with the verb to make the cases align ("valency change" or "voice").
> The fish got hugged by the girl and danced.
This valency-changing strategy works in ergative languages, but you have to *give* instead of get. Something like this:
> The girl gave her hug to the fish and danced.
Because the primitive meaning "give" is the opposite of "get" this is called an anti-passive.
More precisely, the "give" verb means something like "she-self cause girl" - "kiri" has to end up in the absolutive case so the reflexive marker is the agent. Let's make "bo" the verb and "te" a reflexive pronoun.
> Kiri tek bom logu niwaz su veyam
Girl she-self made hug to fish and danced.
Or phrased a little differently
Girl, made by herself to hug fish, danced.
That's the basic idea. In practice this voice is used a lot and will be abbreviated, but the patient usually ends up with some kind of "towards" or "for sake of" preposition to associate it with the auxiliary. And there might be a reflexive or reciprocal hanging around.
So the ergative example carried over to real English would be: "The fish was hugged by the girl and danced."
Do ergative languages use the passive form the same way we do?
Nope
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipassive_voice
Basically, they're transitive sentences are normally passive, so they need to use an "antipassive" voice if they want there transitive sentences to be active like ours normally are.
So is the passive for accusative languages the same as the antipassive for ergative languages? Could a language have somehow both?
As it encoded in the very name, it's the contrary.
Think of it as this: you have two options: "the girl hugs a fish"+"the girl danced" and "the girl hugs a fish"+"a fish danced".
In a nominative language you can do the former without special constructions: "The girl-NOM hugs a fish-ACC and (the girl-NOM) danced". But for the latter you should use passive: "The fish-NOM was hugged by the girl-OBL and (the fish-NOM) danced".
In an ergative languages tables turn. "The default scenario" is "A fish-ABS was hugged by the girl-ERG and (a fish-ABS) danced". But if it was the girl who danced, you should use antipassive to make the girl be in absolutive instead of ergative, and a fish in oblique (usually dative) instead of absolutive.
Yes and no. It's actually called the antipassive, but it's conceptually the equivalent construction. Instead of reducing valency and promoting P to S, you reduce valency and promote A to S. So it would sound something like "The girl hugged of a fish and danced"
11:50
Do your flowers often get eaten by fish?
Do yours not?
Some accusative languages seem to switch to unmarked P-marked A when in passive voice. The first example is in Latin, because of its excellent compact passive, which I really miss in other Indoeuropean languages I know. Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not a Latin expert:
Pisce flos consummatur
[fish-ABL flower-NOM consume-3SG/PRAES/PASS]
"By-fish flower is-consumed"
Older Polish used to mark the agent with the instrumental case, like in this Mediaeval hymn (10-13th century):
Bogurodzica Dziewica, Bogiem sławiena Maryja
[godparent virgin, God-INSTR praise-PART* Mary-NOM]
"Mother-of-God Virgin, by-God praised Mary"
PART* being a feminine passive participle. Nowadays, it would be possible for an unanimate agent, but animate agents need a "przez" ~= "by" preposition with the agent in accusative case. The instrumental case makes the actor feel like a helpless tool. I think that Russian still uses the instrumental for both cases.
Even in modern English: "The fish is consumed by the flower", while the cases are not marked by suffixes, "by" indicates an instrumental role on the flower, while the fish is unmarked.
I think what is going on here is that passivity reverses the logic of A vs P, so the grammatical subject has no marking (as expected), the grammatical indirect object is marked (as expected), only the first is the recipient of the action and the second is the executor. I wonder if an analogical reversal occurs in ergative-absolutive languages.
Well...not quite. First, change "some" to "all" in the first sentence. The very definition of a passive is promoting an object to subject position. It should be _shocking_ if the logical object of a passive construction is _not_ treated as a grammatical subject, since that's the very definition of what a passive is. Specifically, what's happening is the verb is changing from transitive to intransitive, with its sole argument being the raised object of a formerly transitive sentence. So unless S is marked differently, it should have the marking S would. Note also that the demoted agent is always optional. In effect, it's no longer an argument of the verb (or no more so than something like "the table" in the expression "on the table" which, presumably, could be added to every sentence, whether it makes sense or not). Passives generally come into being to help link clauses in discourse. So, for example, if you start talking about something that's the object of your first sentence, but it continues to be what you're talking about, you passivize the verbs to make it the subject. Ergative-absolutive languages have an analog to this called the antipassive, but that's a separate video. Some day!
English can also exhibit ergativity in sentences like "The pasta is cooking". Here, the 'S' in the sentence correlates to the 'P' in the transitive version: "I am cooking the pasta".
I love your work. I created a conlang for my linguistics honor's thesis in university and it was a split-ergative language. High Valyrian is a language i'm DYING to learn.
This is what some call the "middle" voice. The standard analysis appears to be "passival":
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_passive_voice#Passival
Something that I especially like is to make a difference between active and passive subjects : Use two cases, a sort of nominative/ergative and a sort of accusative/absolutive. It works the same in transitive clauses. But in intransitive ones, the subject can be nominative/ergative if the verb is active (work, go) or accusative/absolutive if the subject experiences the action without making it. (die, sleep) An interesting question comes then : which verbs must be considered as active or passive ?
David. I don't know if you have made a video for this, or talked about it in detail, but: Could you make a video on language variants?
Taking for example the situation of the language of french - how it is spoken in Canada as opposed to France.
Was just researching this exact thing when you uploaded this very helpful.
Thank you sooooo much!!! Such a great, yet simple explanation! I've tried to understand the erg-abs logic for so long now... :D and you explained it in less than 15 minutes
If you want to get a feel for why Ergativity is so natural, check out the "anti-causative" verbs we have in English:
I broke the the window.
The window broke (?because I broke it).
The Germans are sinking many submarines.
Many submarines are sinking (?because the Germans are sinking them).
I'm about to close the door.
The door is about to close (?because I'm about to close it).
Notice how the same noun, doing the same thing, is the subject of the intransitive verb but the object of the transitive form. If these verbs were marked with an ergative-absolutive alignment, the same noun would be marked the same way.
This type of verb is apparently one of the main ideosyncrasies of European languages, and I don't think it's a necessary part of nominative-accusative languages. (I think they're called anti-causatives because the transitive form is actually the original; maybe zero-derivation the other way is more common.) In fact, you can see that most transitive verbs do NOT follow this pattern and must be put in passive voice to become intransitive:
I ate the sushi.
The sushi was eaten (?by me).
Flowers kill fish.
Fish are killed (?by flowers).
He will turn the oceans into blood.
The oceans will be turned into blood (?by him).
In any case, however, I think they do provide some insight into why both alignments, as well as active-stative split-ergativity (I think all anti-causatives are semantically passive in their intransitive forms.) are natural, even if they seem strange to us at first.
THANK YOU, this very topic has been giving me a headache all week, I'm so glad you had a video with simple explanations, keep up the good work!
I got it!!!Thank you!!!I have one more question: do you mean only in ergative-absolutive language can we talk about ergative-absolutive case? or we can talk about this marking strategy in for example English?
P.S.My flowers were often devoured by my birds, not fish. Yes, I use WERE because those flowers were eaten up:(
Wow, I heard that theory for why accusativity is much more common for the first time. Mind blown!
Holy shit, this makes SOOOOO much more sense now
Really clear and interesting.
Lots of linguistic lessons couldn't make me understand that, and a 13 minutes video did the trick. Thank you.
All this talk about number of arguments made me think about arity in Erlang. With that context, the talk about marking the arguments reminded me of method call notation vs. function call notation. Herb Sutter's N4165 proposal then seems closely related.
Basque and Georgian do this, and to indicate the indirect object, the Dative Case is used. not to be confused with the Allative. Arabic defines Intransitivity with SVO and Transitivity with VSO
Can't believe u have a RUclips channel!! Glad I found it...totally in love with ur book...Still find it hard to believe that Dothraki is a conlang seemed like a natural lang...Big fan here..
I was trying to understand Pashto case system and this video helped me a lot!!!
I'm reading your book and it's amazing! Not going to create a conlang probably, but very interesting to read as a linguistica student.
I was wondering, in the sentence "the fish eats", is "the fish" the subject or agent? "Eat" is a transitive verb, but there's no subject here.
Also, would verbs in ergative languages inflect depending on the patient/subject instead of agent?
I think I understand ergative now, but what happens when you have an indirect object? -- Also, in the example, where the girl hugged the fish nd danced, to me it seems like there could be a reflexive or mutual quality to it that might need to be shown in the case markers somehow, or a preposition or maybe as a property of the verb. That is, the girl and the fish dance with each other, they dance together, the fish also dances with the girl. Er, though who's the lead might factor in. Maybe the girl leads and the fish follows, unless it's a very happy dancing fish, in which case...OK, yeah, I think I might be over-analyzing a tad. ;) In a typical ergative setup, that wouldn't relate to mutual / reflexive or a "with" situation, which I'd think would be different in grammatical structure. Apologies, since your example intended subject-direct object / agent-patient accusative. I'm just curious how the mutuality would be handled.
My (As of 06/25/16)wife bought me a copy of your book for my birthday(A month prior to our wedding) and I have nearly read it all so far.
Besides my "Hebrew" and "Latin for Dummies" books and my "Japanese the Manga Way" book yours is one of the only books I've taken ANY interest in reading in the past like, ten years.
Before she got me all of these in May, I was busy trying desperately to keep my mind occupied with my old beat up Nahuatl dictionary.
Your book has given me quite a few ideas on where to take my conlangs, and how to rework a few of them. And provided my wife with NONSTOP annoyance as a woman who has absolutely no interest in languages and married a man OBSESSED with language. Thanks again for simply being a hero for linguists everywhere, and uh, Don't Forget To Be Awesome. :D
Man, now I want a print Nahuatl dictionary.
Ha, at least your wife is a linguist. Mines a psychologist, to whom language learning is as onions are to you. Only kinda kidding, she finds it fundamentally incomprehensible, but much like your wife she loves that I love it. (Also she busted up laughing when I shouted, "DAVID PETERSON RESPONDED"[again, I'm a huge fan, no self deprecating joke intended{sorry if I keep gushing, I'm trying not to... lol}])
Hi. I've been working on a conlang. Its grammar models information flow, pretty much exactly like a Message Sequence Diagram. In the language, objects of a verb are not really marked. They agglutinate to the verb they belong to. And there's no marking to differentiate a subject (agent) from a direct object (patient). I had been calling both agent and patient "agents" when writing my ideas down, not being aware of nom-acc and ergat terminology.
So what have I done here? In my conlang, a sentence might be (with English words), Alice gives-key to Bob gives-key to Charlie opens-using-key Lock. Here Alice is definitely an agent, and the lock is definitely a patient. but Bob and Charlie are both agent and patient.
In English you can make this fully nom-acc by making three sentences. Alice gives-key Bob. Bob gives-key Charlie. Charlie uses-key lock. But my language DOESN'T DO THAT.
So what type is my grammar? I have no affixive marking and all patients are also agents. What's this called?
David Miller maybe a form of resultative from mandarin? Ex: I hit-broke the lamp.
So in the example with the dancing fish, how would I go about expressing that the girl was the one dancing in an ergative language?
introduce a new subject
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Peter, you say it's a coinflip whether a language uses this one or that one, but no language is ergative all the way through, while there are plenty of languages which are accusative all the way through.
Maybe word order plays into it, but word order itself is distributed unevenly. Possibly so for a very good reason: UID, information density. There are some theories better known than UID as well.
Ergativity is cool, but it's not close as common as you make it out to be.
Does ergativity regularly coincide with other language features, like an unusual word order or verb structure? Also does it occur in all language types or only in specific ones (e.g. agglutinative languages)?
Ergativity can occur petty much everywhere on the spectrum but often ergative languages are agglutinative.
The one important feature that comes with ergative languages is the antipassive, which is basically, like the name states, the opposite of the passive in accusative languages. For example, in English we would have "I see the dog." in the active, if we passivize it we'd have "The dog is seen (by me).", so we remove the agent and promote the patient to the the subject of an intransitive clause. The antipassive works by removing the patient instead of the agent and the agent becomes the subject of an intransitive clause. So we'd have something like "I see (the dog).", where the patient is implied through some antipassive construction, like the agent is implied in the passive, but left out.
On a side note Tripartite languages usually have both passive and antipassive.
Split-ergative languages like Hindi don't have an antipassive. This is because ergative constructions there actually arise from old passive constructions (because the new past or perfect tense arose from a present tense passive construction). Only homegrown ergative languages have antipassives.
David Peterson Yeah, I probably should've specified that I'm talking about more or less "full" ergative languages like Basque.
Am I correct in assuming that the subject of a stative or copula is (un)marked the same way the subject of an intransitive is?
Yep.
This was super useful. I appreciate your work in this video.
So, how do we get a sentence in an ergative language where the verb 'danced' refers back to the agent? Are pronouns required to make the distinction?
It's called an antipassive, and I just didn't get to it in this video. It does the opposite thing a passive does, but the outcome is the same: the argument that ordinarily wouldn't be assumed is now assumed.
David Peterson Thanks.
I've sent you a question by mail but I want to generalize it for a video maybe:
How do I trinscribe non naturalistic sound systems? The human vocal track can produce alot more sounds than are shown on the API. The best exanple is a growl, used mostly in heavy metal, its a vibration of the diaphragma that produces a growl like sound, and it does not upier in the IPA.
Another question is about scripts: Archaic spelling. when you invent a writing system for a conlang, do you take into acount crazy spelling like Englishes (as the most extream example) or Japanese (as an even more extream example), or do you just transcribe the words phonaticly.
The IPA can transcribe growls, or pretty much anything that happens in the mouth/throat. If it happens somewhere else, you need a different transcription system. If one doesn't exist, you have to invent it.
For the second question, check out my presentation on the Castithan writing system at LCC5: ruclips.net/video/rOdm0z8xBmc/видео.html
I can see why marking s and a or s and p might be a good idea, but marking all of them doesn't seem to have any real benefit. In SA marking you carry the S for the next verb, like the example you gave "the girl danced", in the SP marking you carry P, "the fish danced". But I can't see any logic in marking all of them, what carries to the next verb?
Btw, Am I right to assume that SA marking is active and SP is passive?
On the active, passive part, no.
In the way you're probbaly used to active & passive wording is found in nomitive-accustive languages only ( eg S & A group together).
Active describes transitve & ditransitive ( and all other verbs that take more than one agrument), that states the A and the P in the sentence eg.
I give you the book.
Passivity describes when we take the A in the sentence away and yet still try to tell some one the action that took place eg
The book was given to you.
+Zarsla thanks. It's kinda a weird way how the second example works, the fish being the "center" of the sentence, so I thought that things were acting upon it in a passive way (the girl hugging it) and that's why it was carried to the next bit in a active way(the fish dancing).
As a note, I specifically didn't talk about passives or antipassives in this video, because I thought it was a little complex (better to fully understand ergativity before discussing passive vs. antipassive). Regarding your second comment, the reason the fish is carried over in the ergative example is _JUST_ because of the marking. Don't think about the semantics there. It's just that the verb assumes the absolutive argument (the unmarked argument in the specific example I gave) is going to be the sole argument of an intransitive verb when no overt argument is listed.
Oh, but it's also fine to mark all three (or to leave one unmarked and mark two). In that case, whatever the unmarked one is will probably carry over. My guess is it'd probably be the subject (A).
My conlang has a dative case..and 3 other noun cases that don't exist in Modern English but exists in many Philippine languages.
Dative case is for telling a noun to talk about the indirect object.
This definitely helps with my understanding of ergativity, though it still is a relatively strange concept since I don't speak any languages that utilize this function. I am thinking about creating an ergative absolutive language once i'm done with the one i'm currently working on, and I gain a greater understanding of Ergativity as a concept.
Thank you so much for this video! I'm finally starting to get this. This isn't nearly as difficult as my syntax book made it seem.
Might a reason for A-P alignment be to distinguish between transitive and intransitive verbs with the same root? Like, luri masam might mean the girl said, whereas lurik masam would mean the girl told.
Are there any existing languages that have 0-argument verbs? I'm thinking of something like instead of saying "it is raining", you just say "rains". The action is happening without being done by or to anything.
I'm quite certain there are, even if I can't think of any offhand.
Wow-years later, RUclips recommended this again and didn't show if I had "liked" it before.
(1) How is the ergative Agent Verb Patient (or Patient Verb Agent) different from the passive voice, Object Verb (Passive) Subject ? This, how is "The dolphin (agent) saw the boat (patient)." different from "The boat (patient) was seen by the dolphin (agent)." except in the verb form and the addition of the preposition "by" in English, and that the English flips the agent / patient word order? I mean, looking at the two, if you had case markers, they would be identical or almost so. What am I missing that would distinguish an ergative versus a passive-accusative sentence (or clause or phrase) in an ergative language?
(2) How does an ergative language deal with reflexive verb constructions? Does it lump them in with intransitive verb constructions, or does it have another marking or verb / noun forms? Basically, continuing my questions from a few years ago.
this video was great help to a layman like me -thanks. I found reference to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austronesian_alignment on the wikipedia. Wondering if you could do a video explaining that variation. Looks interesting as I'm imagining the potential cultural impact of such langues and what fun might be hand with such in a secondary world.
So for first time inflection of a verb what is better? Nom/Acc function or Ergative/Absolute or Oblique function ? Both in speech will be work together in times?
When you gave the example 'the girl hugged the fish and danced'...is there a way to tell whether she continued to hug the fish while she danced, or just hugged it, then stopped hugging it, then danced?
In that particular example, I imagined the hugging and dancing as separate things, with the hugging ending before the dancing began. Certainly a language _could_ make that distinction, and I wouldn't be surprised if one did.
What about when you take the patient argument out of a transitive verb? Like if you were to say "I eat/I am eating" instead of "I eat fish/I am eating fish"? Would you mark it as a subject or as an agent?
Also if you were to have a sentence like "I sleep on the bed," would that still consider "I" to be the subject or would it be something else because technically something is happening to the bed?
In "I sleep on the bed", "on the bed" is an adjunct. The core is still "I sleep", so it's still intransitive, and "I" is still the subject.
As for the first, in an ergative language, this is called an antipassive, and I didn't get into them in this video. In effect, though, you change the verb morphology, a transitive verb becomes intransitive, and the ergative argument becomes absolutive (becomes the S argument), with the patient removed.
Amazing video. Love these!
Regarding determining the agent of the second clause based on the arguments of the first clause, how do split-ergative languages handle that?
Depends where the split is. In something like Hindi, it's based on tense, so it's not really an issue (i.e. not often you have a sentence like "I walked the dog and dance", switching tenses without reintroducing the subject). If it's based on animacy, my feeling is you probably have to reintroduce the subject. After all, that's the default: If it just won't work, or the result is infelicitous, you just make it more explicit.
This was SO helpful. Thank you!!
Nominative-accusative languages are far more common than ergative-absolutive ones. SO languages (SOV, SVO, OSV) are also extremely more common than OS languages. Is there any relationship between those things? For me it is quite intuitive that languages that leave the agent unmarked would see it as far more important than the patient, so it would make sense to introduce the agent first and only then patient (and also because of a natural emphasis on the agent). But, by using this same logic, I would deduce that ergative-absolutive languages tend to be OS, but it is not the case.
Yes, I said this (or wrote this on the screen) later in the video. That said, I'm not sure about the co-occurrence of ergativity with OS. I'm sure that study has been done, but I'm not aware of any specific stats on it. I think it's a good intuition, though.
+David Peterson, do you know why the number of OS languages is so small? As far as I know, they account for less than 10% of the languages.
Honestly, the only viable one is VOS, that I've seen (the Malagasy word order). Everything else...I don't know. New information usually comes at the end, and the object is usually the new information. ASL is OVS most of the time, but there it's almost like it's SOV with a dropped subject and a deemphatic copy pronoun of the subject at the end. You rarely see OVS when the subject is a full NP.
I thought transitive verbs required a direct object and intransitive ones didn't? Am I wrong or just not understanding something.. Thanks!
That is correct
Is it possible to have a naturalistic conlang in which the Ergative case is unmarked and the Absolutive case is marked, or is that too unrealistic?
“Really no big deal.” He says while I’m the guy who took three years trying to understand this and literally didn’t at all until watching this video!
Did you give the fish a school book?
Also, I knew that you would choose -k as the ergative suffix :D For some weird reason, Sumerian uses -ak and Basque has -ek for ergative, and those are the only two ergative where I know the suffixes. Guess that's the reason you used it, too.
are you sure sumerian uses -ak to mark ergative? actually I knew -ak is used to mark the genitive and -e is used to mark the ergative! I could be wrong though. if you have any good font that says otherwise i'd be glad to read it!
One reason might be that the "K" sound in Paleo-Hebrew was depicted as a hand/palm symbol. It might have been associated with working, doing some action & stuff like that (being the agent, the mover).
One thing to mention as well is the fact that nearly all reactive languages are sov, or some other word order in which the verb follows the absolutive argument.
I the woman sees
The woman runs
I the woman sees and runs
That was clear and informative. I was wondering if you are interested in comparative linguistics or how languages evolve . It would be highly appreciated ti do some videos about such topics
What person are proper nouns and noun phrases? For example, in a sentence like "I saw John"? would we consider John to be in 3rd person or something else? ... Im asking this because im making a conlang that's ergative in the past tense, and my verbs mark person, and as far as I know, verbs in ergative languages match the absolutive patient, so i need to know which person to use with John.
Proper nouns are still nouns, so third person.
David Peterson i see, thank you :)
As I understand it, Japanese isn't exactly nominative/accusative. The way it was explained to me, the case marker 'wo' denotes that the verb affects the object in some meaningful way. For example, you would say 'watashi ga nihongo ga wakararemasu', not 'watashi ga nihongo wo wakararemasu', since your understanding the language does nothing to the language itself.
Japanese is definitely nominative-accusative. It just also has a topic marker, _wa_. Topic is something different from all this that's best described separately. If _wa_ isn't used, the facts of Japanese are fairly straightforward:
Watashi ga nemashita. "I slept."
Watashi go sushi o tabemashita. "I ate the sushi."
In fact, even with _wa_, it's the same (and more natural):
Watashi wa nemashita. "I slept."
Watashi wa sushi o tabemashita. "I ate the sushi."
Clear nominative-accusative pattern. The topic marker is tangential to the accusativity.
+David Peterson While we're on the subject of Japanese case markers, I have another suggestion: maybe you could make a video about the trigger/topic case somewhere down the line? It's something a lot of western languages don't have, so it's probably something a lot of conlangers would never even consider, that I feel can open up a lot of new syntactic options.
I actually _just_ commented on this in another comment thread! I gave two links there that go over some of it, but yeah, some day I'll do a video on that.
"Remember you have to old on to that idea that enacting some sort of action makes you at least slightly different than being the sole participant of an event"
I wish there was a better way to call this system other than "morphosyntactic alignment". I don't know why would such a complicated phrase would be used to describe it when it seems like all this is marking is who does what during an action, like the difference between "WHO did what" and "who did WHAT".
I ee I made a mistake in my conlang. I wanted to make it naturalistic, but I used an accusative alighment but had patients carry over from phrase to phrase. Now I'll have to create a history of shifting from ergative to absolutive, which suggests a vestige in irregular forms.
And how a lonely agent is treated then? Like, say, we can say "I have done the work" or "I have done". Is the "I" agent in both cases or is it subject in the second one?
At least in English, you can't say "I have done". I imagine the same would be true in an ergative-absolutive language.
+David Peterson That was a bad example, I guess. Well, how about "He ate an apple" and "he ate"?
You couldn't do that in a straight-laced ergative-absolutive language. That would be an antipassive.
+David Peterson Actually, I want to create a tripartite language and I hoped I'd find some information in the video. How "he" should be treated in these these two cases? Equally or not? Or is it up to me and my language?
FueganTV It's up to you, but tripartite means that "he" will be in the ergative if it's the agent of a transitive verb, absolutive if it's the patient of a transitive verb, and the nominative if it's the subject of an intransitive verb. That's how tripartite systems work.
In Dutch 'argument' would be translated as 'player' (speler) and I personally think it is a pretty logic and good word for that meaning
Ok…, what if you have neither transitivity or markings on neither subject, agent or patient?
Depisq fredaurmi - The fish slept
Depisq fre vy fredaurmi - The fish made you sleep
Depisq defleu frejezi - The fish ate the flower
Defleu depisq frejezi - The fish ate the flower (as an inanimate object, the flower cannot be the agent of the sentence)
Defleu, ani depisq frejezi - The flower ate the fish (here an inanimate object is marked as being agent of the sentence)
Defamin freqeulli depisq i fami/ani frezelebri - The girl hugged the fish and [she/it] celebrated (note SVO because both nouns are animate objects)
Mmh, actually, your language seems accusative still or at least since it's a non casual language it look more like one (English has no marking for the accusative case and is still a accusative language). Though your last sentence seems to indicate it tends more toward a kind of tripartite language since you cannot carry the subject through the sentence.
To really have no distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs, you must do so that verbs like sleep or stand can have an object/patient like eat, for example (let's say that daurnini is a word for 'nap/siesta', and oqmo 'night' and apotri 'stand (past)') :
Depisq fredaurmi daurnini - the fish had a nap (lit. the fish slept a nap)
Depisq fredaumi oqmo - the fish slept this night / all the night (lit. the fish slept the night und. he slept it)
Depisq apotri oqmo - the fish stood this night / all the night (lit. the fish stood the night)
I say that cause your sentence seems indicate that 'fre' is a preposition or verb to mean 'made someone do something', if it's so, it's not really different than the prefix 'en-' in french (which has distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs) :
Je dors - I sleep
J'endors le bébé - I make the baby sleep
The only difference in your language is that you can do it with all the intransitive verbs. If 'fredaurmi' need the detachment 'fre' to become transitive then it stays inherently intransitive. To truly have no distinctions between transitive and intransitive verbs, you need to have what i show you in your language (or something similar). However, it would just suppress the inherence of transitivity of a verb. A verb is now 'softwired' to be transitive or intransitive instead of being 'hardwired' to do so. It just that a verb is transitive or intransitive according to the context :
Depisq fredaurmi : intransitive
Depisq fredaurmi oqmo : transitive
Depisq defleu frejezi : transitive
Depisq defleu : intransitive
with in bonus the possibility to construct inductive sentence like this (if i understood correctly) :
Depisq a vy apotri - The fish made you stand
Vy de depisq defleu - You made the fish eat
And if you implement what i proposed you, here you can even do something like that :
Fre depisq oqmo fredaurmi, ani depisq frejezi - The flower made the fish sleep this night/all night
(And i would advice you that in the 'inanimate agent phrase', you may use a pronoun for the animate patient, so the sentence is a lil shorter :) )
The thing with the animate/inanimate is completely separated from the ergative/accusative question.
Could you translate the following sentences :
I give a flower to the fish
the flower is eaten
the fish is eaten
the flower is eaten by the fish
the fish is hurt by the flower
The fish is given a flower by me
A flower is given to the fish by me
So we can see the things clearer ?
(And i ask you all those question to help you ^^)
tonio103683 Sure I'll translate a few sentences for you, however, the passive voice is not possible in Delang.
A few notes,
- fre is the past tense particle (gro is the future, no present)
- andaurnin means a nap
- defeleu mean the flower
- jezi means eating (no infinitive)
Your translation examples
Depisq andaurnin fredaurmi - The fish had a nap
Depisq fredaurmi allnyqt - The fish slept the whole night (nyqt is here used as an adverb)
Depisq frestaui allnyqt - The fish stood the whole night
Az daurmi - I am sleeping
Az gro departaunan daurmi - I make the baby sleep (note future particle, but present tense verb)
Defleu, ani fre depisq fredaurmi allnyqt, i ani depisq frejezi - The flower made the fish sleep all night, and it ate the fish
Your translation requests:
Az aunj depisq anfleu - I (give) a flower to the fish (S-preposition-DO-IO-verb dropped)
? jezi defleu - ? is eating the flower (SVO)
? jezi depisq - ? is eating the fish (SVO)
Depisq jezi defleu - The fish is eating the flower (SVO)
Defleu, ani suvxi depisq - The flower is suffering the fish (inanimate object marked as agent, SVO)
Az aunj depisq anfleu (for both of the last two, which is identical to the first sentence)
I know that the point you are trying to make is that there is limitations to this approach. Such a language won't support passive voice, and I am aware of that. I alway reinterpret passive voice sentences into active voice when translating into Delang.
Mmh does 'andaurnin' is an adverb ? cause so you totally have a difference between transitive and intransitive verbs and your language is accusative or non marked tripartite. Also induction and accusation is not the same thing. You should be careful with that.
Also how do you would say 'The flower is making the fish sleep' ?
Mmh not having passive verbs is not a problem , to translate 'The flower is eaten', you could easily do it through the use of a neutral or impersonal pronoun like 'Ani jezi defleu' 'It/One is eating the flower' (German if i remember is quite found of it).
or by pure absence of pronouns could work too (since your language loves to drop verbs it could also drop the subject probably).
You could imagine a protolanguage without transitivity. Actions are just expressed through juxtaposing of two arguments (like baby language):
Aom-fire/burning
mi-me/being
-ni plural
nyam-food/eating
gulp-prey/devour
-on- being able
-ok being victim of
kakan-lion/danger
sasa-fleeing/legs
ayan-pain/hurt
Mi aom. Aom aom. Nyam Aom. Mi nyam.
I set the fire. The fire burn. Food is cooked. I eat.
That convey the idea 'I cook the food and eat it'
Kakan-ni ! Kakan-ni ! mi-ni sassa ! Kakan-ni gulp-on !
Lions ! Danger ! we flee ! Lions can devour !
There's lions ! It's dangerous ! We must flee cause lions can devour us.
Gulp-sasa-on-ni gulp-ok
The preys that can flee are victim of devoration
Even if prey can flee, they can be devoured
(See here no transitivity, but a kind of passive voice still exist).
Myaom-ok ayan-ok
Me, the victim of hurt is victim of burning
I'm hurt/burnt by the fire
The language can already have a complex suffixing and all, but as soon as you have something like a subject and an object, then you have transitivity. As soon as you have a language that can do :
Mi nyam gulpsasa - I eat prey legs
You have transitivity at play. So Delang is no exception it seems.
tonio103683
'Andaurnin' is a noun.
Defleu gro depisq daurmi - The is making the fish sleep
Delang drops subject also, but much less frequently than dropping verb.
Was this what you meant by "accusative langauges doing funny stuff"?
Çiçek balık yedi.
Çiçek balığı yedi.
The first sentence uses the word "balık"(fish) with no suffixes and relies on the order of the words to convey the functions of the words. The meaning roughly translates to "The flower ate fish" but it can also mean "The flower ate a fish" or even "The flower ate multiple fish".
The second sentence uses the more common accusative and since every word is marked now, the order of the words becomes irrelevant and can be altered to emphasize any of the three words. The meaning, unsurprisingly, translates to "The flower ate the fish", pointing at a particular fish.
So, Turkish makes up for its lack of the definite article by using the absolute case to mark the specificity of an object and looking like an ergative language for a very short time.
Also, I'd love to see you do a video on evidentiality. We only use 2 case markers for past events when marking evidentiality in Turkish (and we cannot form a past-tense sentence without using at least one), but I know there are languages which have specific ways of marking which of your five senses aided in your inference or whether you've heard it from someone and I think it'd be interesting to learn about them.
Yeah, this is always a tough thing for learners. "I went to the trouble of learning this durn accusative case, and now you're telling me not to use it?!" lol I'll do a video on evidentiality, but only after discussing it with Sylvia Sotomayor, who's become the queen of evidentiality in conlanging.
How did I know that the ergative morpheme would be a -k?
Basque?
I remember hearing/reading something about an Austronesian alignment system; will you ever cover that? I think I remember you once saying that Hawaiian is (one of) your favorite language(s), so I don't see why you wouldn't.
Eventually... Hawaiian doesn't participate, though (Hawaiian's pretty straightforward; just one class of verbs called _loa'a_ verbs that act a little funny, but nothing like the Philippine languages). In the meantime, check out this post:
dedalvs.tumblr.com/post/146559512547/in-your-book-you-said-that-it-is-your-strong
And this one:
en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Talk:Conlang/Advanced/Grammar/Alignment/Trigger
Hawaiian doesn't use Austronesian alignment? Weird. I wonder why that is? Do languages often change alignment systems?
Anywho, a bit off-topic, but do you know any good, up-to-date, and hopefully free resources on learning Hawaiian? I'd like to get to that eventually (third on my list of natlangs to learn after French and Breton).
Nah, you're thinking of it wrong. More like Austronesian started out a certain way, then it split, then the languages evolved, then the Philippine languages independently evolved a unique alignment system using its various passives and applicatives. As for free resources, none that I've used (I have a ton of print resources), but these all look promising:
wehewehe.org/
oleloonline.com/
www.olelo.hawaii.edu/
I see. But, it's still the case then that a language can change alignment systems over time. It's just that Proto-Austronesian was the one and then certain daughters get the Austronesian system. I blame the name for the confusion. :P
Thanks for the links, btw. I'd buy resources if I could but that requires employment, which has been difficult for me to find.
One last thing: I can read an IPA chart and pronounce everything from bilabial to uvular without a bit of trouble and then read some pharyngeal. I'm not sure, however, I can distinguish /#?V/ and /#V/. I have a glottal stop in my English, but I don't know if I can do it initially and have no way of telling if I can. The most likely place to find native Hawaiian speakers who could tell me whether or not I can are separate from me due to an ocean, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Contrast that with French, where I could drive a few hours and find native (non-Parisian, granted) French speakers that could help me to some extent. Anyways, are there any sites where people just put recordings of there voice in another language for native speakers to judge? Or is there any way in general to tell?
Super easy to tell in Hawaiian, because, remember, when people are speaking, it's not in isolated words. Thus it's as easy to hear /#ʔV/ as it is /VʔV/. Even if the very first word of a sentence starts with a glottal stop, you'll figure out what it's supposed to be by the end of the sentence. Anyway, easiest way to pronounce [#ʔV] is to hold your breath and then start saying a vowel. The catch at the beginning is the glottal stop.
just a question I have been wondering, how realistic is it to dream of becoming a professional language creator for media as you are. Do you think the demand will increase as more shows are starting to do it and it could become a sort of extremely rare profession. What are your thoughts on that topic?
I think it's fairly unrealistic, I'm afraid. :( The number of jobs are increasing from, say, 1 every 5 years, to 3 every year. That's a HUGE increase, but it's still a drop in the bucket, given that one person is capable of doing 3 jobs in a year. Plus you have to factor in the fact that as shows like these garner more attention, it raises awareness about language creation, which leads to more language creators. So while there's an increase in jobs, there's also an increase in the job pool-likely a larger one, percentagewise. Add to that the fact that Hollywood prefers to work with people they know, AND there's no way to get discovered, and, well, the future does not look rosy. But things may change as the years go on. The best thing one can do is continually work on one's own languages and try to find artists/writers who are trying to break in. Then you can add your language work to their work, and if they break in, you may break in with them. Long odds, but odds, nonetheless.
ok, thanks for your reply. I appreciate it :)
Or you can simply get lucky - which is usually the case with those in business :q We know their success stories because it was _them_ who got lucky instead of someone else. We don't hear success stories from those who didn't get lucky, right? :J
Another important ingredient is connections. The more people in the industry you know (or rather they know about _you_ ), the bigger the chance you get lucky ;)
There's also possibility of grouping all the three together
Does any language mark all three differently?
as in Subject, Agent, and Patient.
said this half way through
A lot of conlangers have employed systems like this, and gone further with what's called a split-S system. A split-S system is where there are four markings total-two different ones for S. The difference is whether the verb has an argument that's more A like or more S like. For example, something like "sleep" would have an S-like S argument, while a verb like "whistle" would have an A-like S argument. Some do this by using either S or A marking with an intransitive verb; some do it by creating a new A-like S marking. But, yes, you can do this. I'm not sure if there's a natlang that does it consistently, though.
@@Dedalvs My language, Alfeme, uses a Fluid-S (active/stative) system, wherein some verbs differ in meaning depending on whether the subject is being active in it or passive/stative.
For example, the verb "lixan" means "I am teaching," whereas "loxan" means "I know," as in this culture they see teaching as an active form of knowing. Similar to this, the preterite form "lixanvi" means "I learned" whereas "loxanvi" means "I found out."
Technically, the objective form for these verbs is an oblique, not an absolutive or a dative as nouns are. In ditransitive verbs, the same absolutive form is used for dative constructions.
This helped a lot thank you.
ye so what's the whole deal with fish and flowers
ergative-absolutive kinda makes more sense to me 🤔
I have a question: can a language be alligned as ergative-absolutive without having any kind of marking?
Absolutely. This is how:
(1) Kama dori. "The boy is dancing."
(2) Tala meli kama. "The girl sees the boy."
(3) Kama meli tala. "The boy sees the girl."
(4) Tala meli kama so dori. "The girl sees the boy and (the boy) dances."
(5) Kama meli tala so dori. "The boy sees the girl and (the girl) dances."
No marking, but undeniably ergative-absolutive.
David Peterson but then, how would we differenciate it from the nom-acc alignment? Could we analyze these examples in nom-acc as well? This that there is no marking whatsoever, depending on how we think it, it could be either which, no?
No, it absolutely could not be analyzed as nom-acc, and that's because of sentences (4) and (5).
David Peterson right, I see. Then, besides that, ignoring the sentences 4 and 5, there would be no way to distinguish between nom-acc versus erg-abs, right?
Right.
Is transitivity the same as verb valency?
I just rediscovered the term "theta grid". That's what you call the exact set of arguments a verb requires in terms of thematic roles. Thematic roles are semantic (based on meaning), rather than syntactic, though.
I've been confused to the point of frustration about ergativity since I first learned about it, but it is precisely due to that frustration that it is now one of my absolute favourite things about linguistics.
Also, do you know if it's possible for a language to have no intransitive verbs/clauses? Or at least very very rarely? Like, for instance, in one of my conlangs (maybe, I might change this for other reasons, e.g., the conlang's actual alignment) you can't say "I sleep". I is "Ru" and "sleep", a noun, is "Mutitvi". You have to say "Ru lamu mutitvi", where, in other cases "lamu" means "have", and in this case it's " to experience". So, it would be "I experience sleep". Is that a system that could exist in some form in the real world? And, if so, what alignment would that even be? Transitive?? An entirely new hypothetical system (lmao probably not)? Ich habe kein Idee.
Nah, but there are arguments I've seen to suggest certain languages don't have _transitive_ verbs, only intransitive. Anyway, no, that's not a new alignment system; it'd just be a language that only has transitive verbs.
Eh, alright. I've already decided to make that conlang a tripartite language, with the Agent and Patient declining by word order and the Subject getting a case marking. Thanks anyway!
Alexei Soltis that sounds pretty weird. A special affix for S but an isolating structure for transitive verbs? Is there any other language that uses such a system?
I talked about this system in my Ergativity Reference Guide here:
dedalvs.com/notes/ergativity.php#7p0
I called it Unitive-Duative. I can think of a way to gin one up diachronically, but it's a one in a million shot. I wouldn't expect to find one in the wild.
I see, thanks!
What about the Tripartite alignment? What's that?
it's just marking each part differently, subject, patient, and agent.
I would suggest that the girl huggs David and dances along anyway.
what if they are all alone, if that can happen???
I am a noob to creating languages, and I just have to say.... I don't understand this at all. whats the point in having either of these. why do you need to mark the do-er with an affix, or why do you need to mark the one done to with an affix? why cant you just have it with context? Is what I'm saying even making sense? do I understand this at all? this is the struggle of trying to make a language while knowing an ungodly low amount of linguistics... I'm a freshman in high school like Jesus christ I have no idea what he's talking about and it just makes me upset cause I want to know but I don't know can somebody help me
Nathan gave a good response, so just do the tl;dr version: There's no point to anything in language, most of the time. Lots of stuff language does you can do, but also you don't have to. Marking participants explicitly in a sentence is one of those things.
Adelizine514 you dont have to mark anything, you can, it is your choice, if you dont understand what a case is, look it up
it frees up word order
Of course there IS a point in language to do things! The first and most important one being: to communicate information. Languages are created to facilitate communicating information. E.g. some words become shorter with time if they are used more frequently. Some words merge together when they are used together very often. Even things like different endings of words or different word orders evolve to convey some information or to let us distinguish some edge cases better. It's just that different languages use different techniques to achieve these goals. Where English uses the word order to distinguish between the agent and the patient, other languages use grammatical case and their endings for the same, so that they could change the word order to something more efficient in conveying information (e.g. they can put more important words first). Languages that can't do that usually come up with some other ways to work around it, such as the passive voice. There's always a reason behind every rule in a language, one just needs to actively look for it and try to understand how does it work and why does it work that way.
What about tripartite?
If the agent was unmarked but the subject and patient were marked the same would that still be ergative?
Yes. All that matters is that they are different. They may both be marked, or only one of them may be marked, or it may not be be obvious which is marked (say if the difference if is a vowel shift or tone shift or consonant mutation or something, or*). That being said marked absolutive is extremely rare. The world atlas of language structures study I link to below only had one in their sample. They had 6 marked nominative cases, the difference is more than can be accounted for by the fact that they had more total Nom-Acc languages than Erg-Abs ones.
wals.info/chapter/98
* Also, although this is often discussed in terms of morphological case marking, there are many other levels if language structure where this difference arises. For example, English has nom-acc syntax in a few obvious ways. One is the coordination-anaphora thing he mentioned in the video ("who danced"), the other is our word order:
SV or AVP
Nominative=before-the-verb
Accusative=after-the-verb
This is case marking by word order.** If you look back at the video, you will see that all his examples, even the ones with Erg-Abs case suffixes followed English word order. If this language has fixed word order, then we would have to say that it has Erg-Abs alignment in morphology (in simple clauses at least), and apparently also in the coordibation-anaphora thing, but Nom-Acc alignment in word order.
This sort of thing where a language is Nom-Acc in some ways or in some situations and Erg-Abs in others is very common in Erg-Abs languages. In fact, oddly enough, apparently there's no such thing as a language that's known to be totally Erg-Abs in all areas of syntax and morphology, even though (I think) many or most Nom-Acc languages apparently are. At least, that's what I've been told by people who were probably linguists is true the way languages have been analyzed. (I'm always skeptical about claims about "all languages" or "no language", especially when there's obvious reason why, as in this case.)
** Interesting to note is that word order is neither alignment in verb-final and verb-initial languages because intransitive sentences would be the same either way:
SV
APV (or PAV, but I think that's very rare.)
VS
VAP or VPA
In any of these situations, you can either interpret the other argumant as being added between the other two or as being added on the outside of the whole thing.
H. H. Thanks
Of course, I find these videos just AFTER a series of tests over the nuances of the English language...
how does passive voice work in an ergative-absolutive language?
miguelceromil
doesn't require it.
Not found in Basque or Georgian
Christopher Ellis thx, so ergative-absolutive languages could be described as always speaking in passive
+miguelceromil
Absolutely not!
Basque has a Middle Voice and a Mediopassive, but I have not seen them outside of the grammar book
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipassive_voice
the anti-passive
Its as confusing as it sounds
Orestes Trivellas I shall enter unholy lands, wish me luck on understanding this structures
Despite my previous comment, i will have to disagree with you, i've noticed that erg-abs construction is somehow more frequent. nom-acc is more popular because indoeuropean languages have spread all over the globe, but if we exclude the "forced" indoeuropean languages for a while, we would see that most indigenous languages tend to have an erg-abs construction. that's my observations
your observations are wrong... Only around 30% of the world's languages are primarily ergative and almost (if not all) of those show some kind of accusativity. Also you can't just ignore an entire language family because it doesn't fit your hypothesis
I thought you said "Sukurin"
Which means "Poor you" in my language.
Marking the three differently = tripartite language
I was just about to ask that, thank you
Atasco Osage You're welcome
Mercure250 What are the names of those cases?
The agent of a transitive verb would have the ergative case while the patient would have the accusative and the one argument of an intransitive would be the absolutive.
Also Nez Perce is an example of a tripartite language
And you forgot to explain why is it called the subject in both cases :q
"A mother beats up her daughter because she was drunk"
Who was drunk?
yes
Is the absolutive case used for both unergative and unaccusative intransitives?
See below (or some other comment; can't remember if it's above or below this) where I talked about Split-S languages. In Split-S languages, no; in regular ergative languages, yes, because it doesn't care about the semantics, just the grammatical role. In fact, whether or not these arguments are treated differently is the factor that distinguishes Split-S languages from regular ergative languages.
A reflexive marker would make sense in a language where the grammar requires an object in every sentence.
"I sleep" isn't a complete sentence, so requires an empty object; to become "I sleep self".
I kick self: Onam pevi.
I kick myself: On ma pevi.
I wouldn't call it a monster raving lunatic marker. A language has its own internal logic.
It is possible, as the language ages that it will eventually drop the ending.
I don't think you'll find a natlang that requires an _object_ in every sentence, though.
you are too obsesed with gish
miguelceromil and flowers
Argativity 🏴☠️ arrg
First