2013/01/25

It's All Tibetan to Me

So, in the process of making Zbin-Ãld ergative, I actually discovered what an antipassive is. Basically, it is a way of marking a transitive verb so that it doesn't need to have its patient specified (the patient of a transitive verb in an ergative grammar is in the same case as the agent of an intransitive verb). It's called the antipassive because it's the reverse of the passive in a nominative-accusative language—the passive allows a verb to have a patient without specifying the agent, while the antipassive allows it to have an agent without specifying a patient. Antipassives only happen in ergative languages because in a non-ergative language the agent's case doesn't change whether the verb has a patient or not.

According to one source I read, by the way, it's semantically more accurate, when translating an ergative language into a non-ergative one, to render a transitive sentence as a passive one. E.g. if you're translating "the dog bit the man" from an ergative language it's actually closer to the nuance to render it as "the man, bitten by the dog". However, A) that's a really clunky way to render a sentence, and B) what do we do with an intransitive sentence, then? They sure as hell aren't more active than transitive ones, that's why their agents are in the absolutive case rather than the ergative one (that is, the "just floating loose" case rather than the "one that does work" case).

Another thing I thought I'd do was have Zbin-Ãld in its semi-classical form, the form used in official capacities, have cases for locative, ablative/instrumental, and dative, but have colloquial Zbin-Ãld and Zhbin-Khmõ (think medieval Tuscan and Old French, if the classical form is Church Latin) have compressed those cases into one oblique case (which, by the way, is my favorite linguistic concept ever).

PS. I just realized, the title makes no sense—Tibetan is one of the several ergative languages that hasn't got an antipassive.

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