Ergativity: Her Likes She
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- Опубліковано 15 кві 2018
- Morphosyntactic alignment, accusativity, ergativity; these are all words I attempt to explain.
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► ERGATIVITY BY DAVID PETERSON: dedalvs.com/notes/ergativity.php
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Thanks for watching everyone. It means a lot. :)
Oh God yes, keep talking dirty to me
Haha! Best comment! I'm pinning this. XD
Gee, thanks!
But really though, in-depth analysis of relatively rare grammar patters... (o˚̑̑̑̑̑ 3˚̑̑̑̑̑ o )
My brain through the whole video
My oh my...
cue careless whisper
I hope, I will get it after 3rd time watching
It dense, I know... :(
+XL Live I first began to understand ergativity from David Peterson's video and his notes on his website. maybe try that out?
My god same this topic is hard to understanddddddd I CAN'T! ;-;
+XL Live О, и ты тут!
@Alexander
He's not marking it with the possessive. He's marking it with the accusative. Think back to one of his first sentences in this video, "she likes her." The word is not acting as a possessive in this example.
He does this because "her" (accusative) is the marked form of the 'neutral' "she."
In other words, he's showing that the subject and patient/object are 'neutral' in purely ergative-absolutive languages and that the agent is marked.
This Video like I.
Haha! Nice.
me gusta
This video I like. Yoda I am
@@beardedglowsquid Wanted for vehicular manslaughter in 38 states I am
Like I this video. :)
(edit) 8/6/2020 THU Noon
This one was quite complex and I'm going to have to watch it a few times. However, I'm really interested in the Fluid-S system. It has so much potential to say things about a culture. For instance, do emotions require volition? Maybe it could vary by context, or by which emotion is involved. Maybe a culture considers sadness to be involuntary but anger to require volition. Maybe they consider sadness the default state and joy something worked at. There are so many ideas to explore and so many things to say with this system. If I ever get to the point of actually fully building a conlang, this is a system I would love to play with.
It's pretty cool alright.
+funisfun8 A fluid-S language does not need to use volition, some fluid-S languages make a stative-active distinction (example: "die" is stative and "kill" is the active form of "dying", I think Georgian is like that), and some use it to be formal (and often for other things to), there are endless possibilities!
Same
And I like the idea of having two English words being one word in that language, where the meaning is changed by the placement of the noun.
In Surigaonon, a Philippine lanɡuaɡe, most emotions including anger, are subjected as involuntary. However, to indicate volition, we use reduplication, a key feature of lanɡuaɡes in the Austronesian family. For instance, Nasuko ako, is simply, I am anɡry. Naɡsuko-suko ako, still means that I am anɡry, however it indicates that I am deliberately so. This is parallel to most of the other emotions as well.
However, with the interestinɡ case of happiness, from nalipay to naɡlipay-lipay, the deliberate hapiness connotes that one is ecstatic or makinɡ the most of their lives.
3:25 "Arrived did Luke; saw did Yoda."
Now you’re speaking like a Jedi Master.
@Some Kind of Master His order is actually sort of like (V)OSV. If there's an action verb, then you put that at the start, then Object, Subject, and finish with a helping verb (if there is no helping verb, you have to add one). Something like "Use(AV) the force(Obj), Luke(Sub) did(HV)." If you're using a linking verb, that goes at the end of the sentence and you use OSV. Something like "Happy(Obj), Luke(Sub) is(LV)."
His rule for where each verb goes is not unlike English questions, which also split up its verb phrases in a similar way by putting helping verbs at the start but keeping action verbs in their normal place ("Did(HV) you(Sub) do(AV) that(obj)?"), but Linking Verb sentences are put only at the start ("Are(LV) you(sub) happy(obj)?").
I wonder if in universe the sentence structure is AV-O-S-LV/HV in whatever his native language is. If so, that would be a very interesting language.
PS: It's worth noting that linking verbs and helping verbs are the same words (am, are, is, was, were, etc.), the only difference is context, whether they're the sole verb in the sentence (LINKING the subject and object) or not (HELPING the main/action verb)
"I need a study break," I say naively, about to spot a 10 minute video on ergativity.
I got lost, and I speak Basque, I dont know how ergative it is
Basque is VERY ergative. In fact, it is commonly used as THE go-to example for an ergative language.
Yeah i know that, but when it comes to using examples i just dont understand, maybe its beacuse im used to it and i dont see the difference
Well you say Gizona ettori da BUT GizonaK mutila ikusi du. With an English-accusative logic you would have hilight the object of the second sentence, not the subject^^
@@mikeelooelo8040 The fact that he uses English is problematic. Also most of the things he says are wrong. Because both the nominative in a nominative-accusative language and the absolutive in an ergative-absolutive language can be marked. (In Basque the absolutive is not marked but that is not necessarily the case)
If you consider these examples from Wikipedia.
Martin-Ø etorri da
Martin-ek Diego-Ø ikusi du
In the first sentence Martin is the Subject in a sentence with an intransitive verb and has no suffix.
In the second Martinek is the Agent in a sentence with a transitive verb and it is marked.
A non-ergative language would have had either the same suffix in both cases or no suffixes in both cases. For example a typical hypotherical conservative Indoeuropean language could have had (here both the nominative and the accusative are marked):
Martin-us 'came'
Martin-us Diego-m 'saw'.
Ápo. This is very confusing...
Good god, you know so much. No one I know personally is as interested in this stuff as I am and no one I even know of is as interested in it as you. Good on you, man.
Join our conlanging server on Discord, or check the conlanging subreddit, Artifexian, while great for beginners, doesn't really go too in-depth
I think a better way to explain accusative vs. ergative alignment is as such:
Accusativity emphasizes the action.
Ergativity emphasizes the effect.
Not really. A better explanation is that nom-acc emphasises the agent. Whereas erg-abs emphasise the object
Bob The Builder True. Good point.
Some language only exploits the ergativity when it is a resultstive, not generally an action done or caused on another thing but an action that creates or produces or results stuff. For example: I bake a cake, where I in in A and cake in P, but I like you, I is S and you is Accusative.
@@SchmulKrieger There's not really an example of ergativity in English. The so-called English ergative verbs is not really how ergative languages work..
@@senantiasa I did not give an example about the ergativity in English rather an example of a resultative in an accusative language.
The Fluid-S system makes me so excited! There’s so much potential in poetry and literature for expressing emotions (happiness wasn’t his choice, instead it came to him) and situations with this system. I’d love to study it more and find languages that have this. Thanks for the awesome video! This was super enticing ^_^
*cries in analytic*
In Vaaran, neither A nor P are marked, and it's just by the word order. A V P.
I make toast.
You can't really play around with it, with one exception: You can add a prefix *e'* to the beginning of the verb to mark that it is "passive", i.e. P V A.
Toast e'make I.
For intransitive verbs, you can still add *e'*, but it changes the meaning slightly. It turns the verb transitive by, effectively, being "was made to". e.g.
I sleep
I e'sleep: I was made to sleep (e.g. by my tiredness, or someone with chloroform).
I think word order here is kinda considered to be a type of marking
As long as A or P are treated like S (be it word order or inflection) then we are still talking the same concept
Cool system.
+Shehab Omran in which case Vaaran's nom-acc, then. Mostly because I didn't realize that doing it in any way other than the way English did it was an option.
Just like Shehab Omran said, if the language doesn't mark any of SAP and it's purely based on word order, that's a type of alignment in itself, called direct alignment. An example of a purely direct language is Chinese, as well as all non-pronouns in English.
bruh how obscure is Vaaran? I looked it up and couldn't find anything explaining what it is lmao. Ima guess it's spoken in India though cause it appears to use the same script as Hindi.
Morphosyntactic alignment is my the most favorite topic and I can talk about it for hours and days. If no one listens, I talk to myself:)
There is one theory that historically languages (both Nominative-Accusative and Absolutive-Ergative ones) marked both Agent and Patient and later lost one of those markers, since it was quite hard to built sentences like "He entered the room and saw her". Having a Tripartite System forced speaker to say
He'UNMARKED' entered the room and he'ERG' saw her'ACC'
There is a theory that there was no passive or antipassive voice in those languages and invention of those killed the Tripartite System. Speakers had to choose either model.
Futher comes a totally unproved info. In times even before that, languages marked all thee arguments, just like in the beginning of this video -
He'SUBJ' entered the room and he'ERG' saw her'ACC'
But those "S"-markers were lost quite fast.
Another theory states different idea, way more complex than the previous one.
All of this stuff was once a giant system to do two major things:
A. To differentiate between intentional and unintentional actions - like "I slip" and "I slide".
B. To show difference between animated and unanimated subjects. And this part here is hell more vast and complex, since there are levels of 'animateness'.
English language slates that people are alive and can be called HE and SHE while everything else is shit. Not only stones or chairs are IT, but also animals, plants and... children under certain age!
Many other languages gather people and animals in one group (animated ones), stones, clouds, stars, buildings, cars into another group (unanimated ones) and trees, insects and marine lifeforms swing there and back from language to language. Sometimes within one language the speaker chooses how to treat the subject. Same in English: a dog can be HE or SHE and can be IT depending on the context.
However! There's more to that. Modern languages mainly differentiate subjects relatively simple - alive or 'unalive'. But, just think of it, plants can be in a special group of subjects that are alive but don't think for example. We can call them semi-alive ones. Or even further: imagine a grammatical subgroup of subjects that are semi-alive and live on one spot (like plants or corals or mushrooms) and a grammatical subgroup of subjects that are semi-alive and walk/run/swim/fly/slither/formicate. Like insects for example, or worms.
Thus there can be (and very likely it did take place in ancient languages) multiple levels of 'animateness'.
Can you imagine how big and 'multicomponental' such system is! Morphosyntactic alignment is a huge topic, but it's a fraction of those giant two systems I described above.
Another thing intrigues me - what if a certain language was Ergative one and lost its flexions and case system. Say like English. And only the word order showed what is where.
"John loves Maria" - who is who here?
Since Absolutive case is considered the neutral one in Ergative languages (as Nominative in most of the languages we are used to) will it be in the beginning of the sentence?
John'ABL' loves Maria'ERG' - wops! - this is Maria who loves here:)
Sooo, is it an OVS word order?
And here comes the third issue that bothers me a lot.
We study languages using Nominative-Accusative logic. Everyone who gets interested with linguistics immediately gets caught in this trap, because the whole modern linguistics was created by Europeans. And 99% of the European languages are Nominative-Accusative.
Linguistics as a science was introduced by Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans. But even after decline of those great cultures multiple heterogeneal European cultures went on maintaining that Ancient Greek and Ancient Roman way of thinking.
Even if linguistics was created in astonishingly ancient times, when Europe was inhabited by Pre-Indo-European culture(s), ancient Greeks and Romans 'corrected' linguists of the past in order to comply those rules with logic of their languages and eventually their way of thinking.
Thus, even describing Absolutive-Ergative logic that is 180º opposite to our logic, we still use S-A-P or S-A-O models. Do you see it? That P stands for Patient and O stands for Object. We keep on trying to see receivers of an action. But the tricky part is that in "Ergative way of thinking" *the object is active and the subject is passive.*
I am Russian. We have tight connections with Caucasus here for centuries and there are many Caucasians around. I talked to many native speakers of Caucasian languages (since Caucasians are fluent in Russian) and they told me wonderful things. Younger people don't understand ergativity, they just speak their language. Elder folks don't understand accusativity! They don't consider a verb as a way to describe movement of action from the doer. Like light beam that is being emitted from a body. They consider verbs as an action that is being experienced by the doer. The direction is 180º opposite. In accusativity we shine into the world and in ergativity kinda world shines into us (impossible to describe using English which is a Nominative-Accusative language). Even unmarked -and from the outside absolutely same sentences like "I eat" or "The dog is sleeping"- we and they will understand differently. To us - we do the eating, we do the sleeping, we do the walking or the working. For ergative folks they experience the eating, they experience the sleeping, they experience the walking or the working.
If you think more about it - this way of thinking is a huge difference in behavior and in the way we treat the world.
Ancient cultures (the further we go back in time, the more we see it) tended not to interfere into the world. They let the world be and were part of it. In Nominative-Accusative logic we DO. We change things around us and our verbs tell us that we are the masters here.
Замечательный комментарий. Спасибо 🙏🏼 В Россию поеду, с Божию помощи, через Грузию, через пару месяцев. Я бразилец из Америки
My native Tagalog has an Austronesian alignment, but everyday speech is constructed in ergative-like patterns.
That's because we use the "common sentence pattern" which is either VSO or VOS, but formal speech uses the "uncommon" one which is SVO. By O, I mean the non-subject agent or patient. We use particles to mark the S or O, so morphosyntactic alignment wouldn't be complicated if it weren't for the fact that we have 6 voices. If you're a nonnative speaker, one mistake and you could be telling your native speaking friend that your shirt has washed some soap using your mom as an instrument.
This comment really fucked me up. I'm a native Tagalog speaker and I am still confused about our morphosyntactic alignment when I observe sentences but when speaking, I do just fine. Could you say, "Your shirt has washed some soap using your mom as an instrument" in Tagalog and with the right particles and alignment?
cadr003 This is actually quite interesting! For the common pattern (VSO and VOS respectively), take the examples "Bili si Mark ng mansanas para kay Juan," and "Bilhan si Juan ng mansanas ni Mark," i.e. "Mark bought an apple for Juan," and "Mark bought Juan an apple," vs. the uncommon (and more formal-sounding) SVO pattern of "Si Mark ay bili ng mansanas para kay Juan," i.e. "Mark bought an apple for Juan." The verb is always modified in relation to the voice and the tense being used. This owes to Tagalog's inherent Austronesian alignment, but there is one catch: Tagalog also uses the forms "nila, ninyo, and niya" (taken from "sila, kayo, siya.") This only ever happens when the subject is a pronoun in VSO order (like in "Kain la ang adobo," i.e. "They ate the adobo," which has an an agent trigger) and never when in SVO order (like in "Sila ay kumain ng adobo," i.e. "They ate the adobo." which has an object trigger.) So I'd say Tagalog uses Austronesian alignment for most cases and ergative meanwhile for pronouns in VSO.
My parents speak Tagalog but I don't, and to me the voice system is definitely one of the most insane parts about trying to learn/understand it.
Javie Mike I was honestly exaggerating a bit. But you could confuse probably up to two arguments by giving them the wrong particles. Remember that "si" and "ang" are for subjects while "ni" and "ng are for objects. So "Nilabhan ni mama ang damit ko." (Mom washed my clothes.) VS "Nilabhan si mama ng damit ko." (My clothes washed mom.) The issue is a lot more obvious when you write it down, but "ng and "ang" can sound alike when you're speaking, especially when you speak fast. Good thing that we use "yung" instead of "ang" in informal speech. However, throw in the issue that "si" is actually "ni" in Ilocano. I used to live in Baguio, and native Ilocano speakers interchanging those two words was a common source of confusion for me and teasing for them.
You could also incorrectly conjugate the verb itself and use a different voice from what you intended and say, "Pinaglaba ako ni mama." (I was made to do laundry by my mom.) VS "Pinaglaban ako ni mama." (My mom did laundry for me.) Notice how one letter changed the voice of the sentence. Now consider "Pinanglaba ako ni mama." (I was used by mom to do laundry.)
Also, this isn't standard, but in my dialect, one form of the agent trigger looks similar to the patient trigger, the only difference being the stress. For example, "NA-kain ako ng sibuyas." with a stress on the first syllable "na" means "I eat onions." However, if you put the stress on the second syllable "ka," it means "I was eaten by an onion." Obviously this funny example can be clarified just by context, but there are other situations where the meaning becomes ambiguous.
I probably gave too many examples just to answer your question, but as you can see how easy it is to confuse two arguments. It's not as easy, however, to confuse three arguments with one agent, one patient and one instrument. This might be possible, but I couldn't think of an example, so it doesn't seem like a mistake one could make.
Artifexian uploaded; drop everything.
Hehe. Hope you enjoy.
Yess! Finally, I understand the ergativity. Thank you so much! 💖
No probs, pal.
The crazy thing is that the conlang I've been working on-and-off for about a decade now turned out to be ergative-absolutive completely by accident, before I even knew what morphosyntactic alignment was.
Of course, once I learned about it, I took advantage of this fact to add more ergative-absolutive features to the language, and since it's not supposed to be a naturalistic language, there are next to none nominative-accusative features in it (if any at all).
There are no explicit case markings though, the ergative case is marked solely by where the agent is placed in the sentence, that is to say word order is the only case marking in my conlang.
Bajan Creole is direct in all instances except first person singular, in which it is accusative.
she like she = she likes her
it eat he = It ate him
dem want we = they want us
Really! Cool
In writing that comment, I realized something. Though just the base of transitive verbs (and those that take prepositions) used in sentences generally denote past tense, that doesn't seem to be the case for some. From what I can tell, and what's interesting is that those exceptions seem to all be feelings.
*Normal*
Past:
I watch TV = I watched TV
Present:
I duz watch TV = I watch TV
Past:
I drive ta de store = I drove to the store.
I duz drive ta de store = I drive to the store.
*But*
I like she = I like her.
I tink he lying = I think that he's lying.
I feel I see he before = I think (have a feeling, feel as though) that I've seen him before.
I found this interesting.
Cool
i just realized my native language is ergative-absolutive and im shaking
I like the way German uses the accusative case to highlight P by changing its article. For instance, the sentence "der Hund beißt den Mann," "the dog bites the man." Both nouns, Hund (dog) and Mann (man) are masculine, using the article "der" in the nominative case. But as soon as der Mann becomes P, its article changes to "den," meaning that (as long as the verb has the second place in the sentence) it doesn't matter what order A and P are, so long as they keep their correct articles. "Der Hund beißt den Mann," has the same meaning as "den Mann beißt der Hund."
German is also a good example to visualise ergative! It's a bit counterintuitive, but "es gefällt mir" is basically ergative:
es is the P, the thing being liked, and is in Nominativ, the same case as an S (in this case, Nominativ is like absolutive).
Meanwhile, mir is the A, the one liking it, but it is not in nominative, instead in dative which acts as ergative.
To use his triangle method:
Es sitzt.
Ihm gefällt es.
Compare to nominative:
Es sitzt.
Es mag ihn.
Learning German made me realise how difficult cases and tenses must be difficult for non-native speakers. (Native are Kazakh and Russian)
@@RazvanMaioru It gets even wilder:
In
Mir ist warm/kalt/schlecht.
we leave out the subject in nominative altogether and completely violate the basic rule that German verbs always require an N-complement... (And yes, that may have started ecliptic, but it's not anymore as you can't just add "es" without it becoming wrong.)
This is probably my favorite video of yours from the last few months! Excellent work on a topic I've frankly never heard of before. Vexillology has (somehow??) become a hot, shareable topic lately, so your flag video felt a little more derivative, but videos like these feel like they take me straight into unfamiliar literature, which I love.
Haha! Lots of flag love happening around the world at the moment. I love it. :)
I have been trying to understand ergativity, but everything I've read just didn't click with my brain and only confused me further. Turns out all I needed was diagrams and your wonderful accent. Thanks so much!
I focused on Ergativity in Dzongkha for my masters degree in linguistics many years ago and had such a difficult time QUICKLY explaining Ergativity to other people. This video is awesome in how efficiently and effectively you explain it. Bravo!
As of S (A P) alignment at 6:00, it is called "transitive" and it happens in Rushani.
This is one of the only small channels in my subscription list.
Here, this video will demonstrate why that is the case.
Also another thing on ergativity: "I shut the door and slammed" makes no sense in English, because English is nominative-accusative. You have to say "I shut the door and it slammed" to make sense, but in ergative languages, "I shut the door and slammed" would mean the door slammed
Enjoy for what I'm gonna give you.
"I shut the door and slammed"? Is that an accident? Like you were just closing the door but it slammed?I'm gonna try to translate this, but I'm not good at explaining. I'm not sure how to translate this in my language.
*Akong gisirado ang portahan ug nabundak.* -> I closed the door and slammed.
It literally means "I shut the door and slammed", but it doesn't really fit in the sentence.
*Akoang gisirado ang portahan ug nabundak.* -> I closed the door and slammed.
It means the same thing as above, but it can sometimes mean "My shut the door and slammed". Because "Akoa" means "My/Mine" and "Akò" is like "Akoa" but shortened and usually used for verbs.
*Akoang gisirado ang portahan ug nabundak/nibundak siya.* -> I closed the door and it accidently/purposely slammed.
"Siya" is the meaning of "She/He/It", like English. This feels fitter than the first ones. The difference between "Nabundak" and "Nibundak" is; "Nabundak" means "slammed" and it was an accident, while "Nibundak" means the same but on purpose. But because of dialects, someone might not agree with me. Wondering why the first ones didn't have "Nibundak"? Sometimes we blame the door for slamming itself when we were doing it *GENTLY* . Sarcasm, but it's true.
*Akò ning/nang gisirado ang portahan ug nabundak/nibundak siya.* -> I closed this/that door and it accidently/purposely slammed.
"Ning" and "Nang" are the shortened versions of "Kini/Kani" and "Kanà" which mean "This" and "That".
*Akong gisirado ang portahan ug nabundakan/gibundakan nako.* -> I closed the door portahan and I accidently/purposely slammed (it).
This is a more fitting version for me. "Gibundakan" is the same as "Nibundak" but it is the victim of the verb, the same as "Nabundakan". Like when you slam your notebook on the table, but you accidently/and you purposely slammed the spider. Making the spider a victim of the verb "slam".
*Akong gisirad-an ang portahan, pero nabundakan nako.* -> I closed the door, but I accidently slammed (it).
This fits the most if it was an accident, "Pero" is used and it means "But". If this was on purpose, the closest translation is the example/attempt above this one. "Gisirad-an" means the same as "Gisirado", just a different term. If you read all the way here, I'm letting you know that I'm just translating for entertainment since I've got nothing to do.
*Ako rang gisirad-an ang portahan, pero nabundakan nako.* -> I just closed the door, but I accidently slammed (it).
This is the same as the above, but the addition of "Ra" which means "Just". Same thing happens with the one on purpose if "Ra" is added.
To translate this word-by-word, I'm using "|LETTER |" to let you know that's one word:
1. Akong gisirado ang portahan ug nabundak. -> |I *-connector* | |closing | | *subject marker* the | |door | |and | |slammed |
2. Akoang gisirado ang portahan ug nabundak -> |My or I *-connector* | |closing | | *subject marker* the | |door | |and | |slammed |
3. Akoang gisirado ang portahan ug nabundak/nibundak siya. -> |My or I *-connector* | |closing | | *subject marker* the | |door | |and | |accidently slammed/purposely slammed | |she, he, or it |
4. Akò ning/nang gisirado ang portahan ug nabundak/nibundak siya. -> |I or (shortcut of)My | |(shortcut of)this/that *-connector* | | *subject marker* the | |door | |and | |accidently slammed/purposely | |slammed | |it |
5. Akong gisirado ang portahan ug nabundakan/gibundakan nako. -> |I *-connector* | |closing | | *subject marker* the | |door | |and | |accidently slammed/purposely slammed | |I(did) |
6. Akong gisirad-an ang portahan, pero nabundakan nako. -> |I *-connector* | |closing | | *subject marker* the | |door | |but | |accidently slammed | |I(did) |
7. Ako rang gisirad-an ang portahan, pero nabundakan nako. -> |I | |just *-connector* | |closing | | *subject marker* the | |door | |but | |accidently slammed | |I(did) |
That's it. :P
8/6/2020 THU Noon -> Afternoon
Why did I do this?
@@judgedread2888 Cool, what language is this? Sounds familiar.
@@BintanginTaya
It's Cebuano, a language of the Philippines, though not the official one.
I don't think it's about ergativity, though. English is a non pro-drop language, which means it can't drop the subject of a sentence without changing its meaning. This is due to the lack of a complex verbal conjugation and happens in french too, for example (there's a graphical verbal conjugation but isn't pronounced). Italian, instead, is a pro-drop language: the subject doesn't always have to be expressed, because almost every verb conveys number and person: for example, "io mangio" means I eat, and "noi mangiamo" means we eat, but "mangio" already tells you it's a first person singular and "mangiamo" is a first plural. So the subject can be dropped without changing their meaning: "mangio" and "mangiamo" are completely clear by themselves, there's no ambiguity. "Eat" (1sing) and "eat" (1plur), instead, aren't differentiated, so we have to add the subjects.
So, about your example, an english speaker will assume the verb "slammed" has the same subject as "shut".
this is genuinely one of the coolest videos ive seen in ages. forgot about my passion for linguistics for a while, thank you for sparking it up again
My teacher used your video in my latin class to help teach the class about accustive cases in latin.
This made me think of a great advantage of SOV word order; it allows for an analytic language to have an ambiguous morphosyntactic alignment. As long as word order is definite, the simple act of placing the subject/agent before the object/patient makes the sentence semantically clear.
Mind-boggling. As far as accusative and ergative I was feeling so clever. Then you started with the combinations and I felt such a doofus. :)
This is the very best explaination of ergativity one can find in the internet. Very helpful, thank you (and the people who helped you) for making this :)
This took me about 24 re-watches to finally get this whole thing.
I have just subscribed despite this being only the second video of yours I've watched! Thanks for making my linguistic studies much easier to understand! The language in WALS (which is basically my textbook this semester) tend to be very formal and could take a couple passes to understand, so this video really helped me understand chapter 108!
Dude! You used Powerpuff Girls without me noticing and actually explained transitive and intransitive in a way I could understand and remember, something my university grammar instructor failed to do.
Sub!
I don't think I fully followed you there, but that was a trip and a half. Fantastic presentation, both in the verbal and graphical styles.
Wait, so at 4:17, how can you just drop “Brock” from the sentence? There’s no way to mark that on the noun or verb, right?
He says that it's innaccurate because English wasn't built to handle it.
It's an imperfect example cause English doesn't deal with the antipassive voice.
My guess is (and I could be wrong here) that the verb would change form in a language that uses the antipassive voice but such a form does not exist in English.
Artifexian got you, thanks for the reply :)
No matter how you modify the verb you would lose information, unless the verb had Brock in it. I can imagine saw in an antipassive voice but not in such a way that contains Brock. Surely it would be Ash came and (anti-passive saw) Brock.
The antipassive drops information on the patient the same way the passive drops information on the agent. It can be recovered with a preposition if this is wished.
You explained it so well! I just wanted to let you how much I appreciate this video!
Dude, best explanation of ergativity out there. You nailed this! Big props!
I spent a lot of time trying to figure this out some years ago. I think this video explained it impressively well for ten minutes! I wish I could have had access to an explanation as good as this one back then.
Thanks you so much! This coupled with about 2 hours worth of skimming through biblaridion videos featuring split ergativity in his conlangs have lead me to create my own language, which has ergativity split on animacy and, to a certain extent, grammatical voice. Thanks artifexian! :)
Thank you very much, Edgar! I started constructing a conlang with tenses split ergativity, inspried by your video. That is super mega fun to mess it.
This is an excellent video :) Ergativity has confused the life out of me ever since my boyfriend at Uni started studying Basque as a hobby. But as the saying goes, a picture tells a thousand words and you present it in a way that makes such intuitive sense in my mind. I'd ended up settling on a split-s alignment for a language I'm building, though hadn't thought through the potential for expressing slip~slide type volition using the same verb yet. I was still thinking how it impacts on what IE languages use passive voice to express. So not only to the usual high standard but perfect timing to boot :)
this helped so much on my final paper for my archaeology class! Reasearching the verbal grammar of Classic Maya (where each verb has inherent aspect and debatably inherent ergativity that acts like an equivalent... basically their verbs have their own noun cases.... also their nouns have inherent verbs.... it’s a. ery strange language) made sooooo much more sense
Thanks for making this. I've been trying to figure out what the weird alignment system I made up for my Conlang was and now I know it's fluid s.
I'm glad you made a video on ergativity. I find it tremendously helpful. Thank you!
I had an assignment to do with explaining the case alignment pattern of an anonymous language. This has given me the information I need to solve it. Thank you so much! Such a helpful video.
I still give you the credit for properly teaching me intransitive and transitive verbs that my teacher has failed over a semester to do.
That was actually really fascinating, fantastic video! Thanks for the knawlegde
Wow, great job! Such a difficult topic in such an easily understandable way. Thank you for this!
This is probably the most easy to understand sourse on the subject I've found. You know, I struggled so much with the concept of ergativity in the past. It is deceptively simple but comes very unnaturally to nominative-accusative language speakers that I couldn't imagine it.
I can imagine a fluid-S system being used to encode more information, as in your example of deliberate vs involuntary action.
I'm creating a language that's ergative-absolutive in its word order. All sentences are AVP (agent verb patient), even if there's no agent.
A it nay. "The dog walks."
Mi a it nay. "I walk the dog."
(mi = I, a = verbal particle, it = walk, nay = dog)
A top cay jel. "The snow melts."
Sil de a top cay jel. "The sun melts the snow."
(sil de = sun, a = verbal particle, top = melt, cay jel = snow)
There's also an antipassive (I think?) with words such as "to say", where in order to say "speak" as in "say things", you take and make it a noun that's the object of "to do".
Yan ba ne. "Don't say that."
Yan ba. "Don't say it."
Yan sa ba. "Don't speak."
(yan = verbal particle, sa = to do, ba = to say, ne = that)
Cool! I'm also making my own language, but I have not enough words to make fully ergative-absolutive sentences yet.
8/6/2020 THU Afternoon
Holy shit I love the visuals in this
1:14 A lot of languages have redundancy, it helps in a case were the listener misses a part of the sentence.
That's fair but redundancy does help here. There is a pressure to mark S like A or O. If there weren't we'd see a lot of tripartite systems.
Wow. This was a fantastic video. I liked the references to nat langs which demonstrate the features you were describing; it really helped to show how, despite appearing weird, speakers have made use of alternative approaches. Keep up the great work! I really feel like I learn a lot with these vids. Here's hoping that you'll get a look in if they ever decide to do a Crash Course Languages or something :P
Super interesting! I always had trouble getting ergativity and this laid it out very clearly.
These concepts made no sense to me for so long, thank you soooooo much.
No I just have to reword, like, all of my conlang…
When I watched David Peterson's video about this subject few years ago, I was quite "lost", thanks for plugging the holes in my head.
Brill, glad I could be of service.
This is fantastic. I was confused when I first saw the word "Antipassive" in the Bundjalung dictionary and this explains it really well. Loads of Australian languages work this way.
THANK YOU SO MUCH THIS IS SO PRECIOUS
In one or two months, you'll probably get your 100K well deserved subs!
I CAN'T WAIT!!!!!!!
Wow, nearing the 100k subscriber mark!
Great explanation, thank you! Will point my typology students to this vid. Seems heaps more helpful than the explanation in the textbook.
I did the first minute of the translation in French (although, it still needs to be verified and obviously completed: I might continue the translation later).
It takes a lot... a very lot... a very big lot... a huge very big lot of time!
edit: I did the first 3 minutes
PS: Could you try not to end your sentence in the middle of a tenth of a second? UA-cam subtitles' timing cannot be more precise than a tenth of a second. Lol.
Got a proto language that was ERG/ABS and had switched to primarily non-Ergative. Except for the subjects intransitive verbs (fluid-S) and past tense. I think.
You and bib are like great to watch/listen to while I’m squeezing my brain like a sponge trying to make this work how I want it to.
I think it's easier to explain as "She likes her," but "Her likes."
or, Her likes she, but slept she
Some extra notes on Dyirbal:
- While Dyirbal has accusative-aligned 1st and 2nd person pronouns morphologically, the pronouns are still syntactically ergative! You can demonstrate this using S/P pivot sentences - A first or second person S in an initial clause still requires an antipassive construction in order to be an A in the second clause, even though S and A forms are morphologically identical!
- As if pronominal morphosyntactic alignment wasn't complicated enough in Dyirbal, the relative pronoun (that is, the pronoun that introduces a relative clause, like "whom" in "the man whom I met yesterday") has tripartite alignment!
If you want to read more about these, you can read R. M. W. Dixon's grammar on Dyirbal from the late 70s (if I recall the year on it correctly).
This is the greatest thing ever!!!!! Is there any chance you could make a video explaining parasitic participles?
Thanks for this amazing video, which is of soooo much help to me.
FINALLY! I couldn't figure out what ergative-absolutive _meant_ after this video. All I read was a rewording of nom-acc. Thank you so much for covering this!
Split-Ergative, or, "Splugative", if you will
I like the fluid one. It gets rid of verbs, which works for my conlang as the speakers live in the north. Voluntary things are ergative, and involuntary is normal. So “she is on the dragon” means she didn’t mean to get in it. But “the dragon is on she” means she deliberately got in it.
Thanks, i will include this in my conlang
Check the resources in the dooblydoo. Read up as much as you can about the topic.
im a kurd, this was interesting to watch because my language is ergative too
Oh, that explanation of uses for the antipassive voice hit some spots.
I find it easier and more intuitive to think of the ergative and absolutive cases as "Her slept" and "She likes her" (instead of "She slept" and "Her likes she"). That way you don't have to rethink the direction of the action as 'her' doing something to 'she'.
This is actually a more common way to explain simple ergativity to people who have not otherwise learned about it. And you're right, it is more intuitive.
@@Sovairu Thank you.
@@stekeln You're welcome.
Great info, didn't even think of this before. Thanks!
Glad to be of service.
I didn't expect I'd learn more about ergativity from someone who started from calculating planets and stars!
Fluid-S sounds really cool! I never knew about that type of language before, thanks :D
Finally I understood what ergativity is. Thanks!
Very cool content and stunning animations! thank you!
Linguistics can be quite trippy, this was fascinating to watch. It was very mathematical and logical, such a different way to look at language other than just the beauty of it, it is about the structure of it.
Hindi is an example of using Split Ergativity in the past tense. When we talk about the preterite tense (not imperfect), we have to use the particle "ne" to show the "do-er" of a verb. Something interesting happens in the sentence. Verbs in Hindi usually take the gender of the subject of the sentence, but in the preterite the gender of the verb depends upon the object.
Present tense sentence: Mai khaanaa khaati hu. (I eat food)
In this sentence the verb "khaati hu" is in the feminine form which tells us that the subject of the sentence ("mai", which means "I") is a female person.
Preterite tense sentence: Maine khaanaa khaayaa. (I ate food)
In this sentence, the verb "khaayaa" is in the masculine form because the object "khaanaa" (food) is a masculine word, even though the "mai" might be feminine in this case. The gender of the person who ate the food is unknown in this sentence. We can also see the particle "ne" attached to the "mai" making it "maine" (pronounced meh-nay).
Side note: Split Ergativity only occurs in Hindi with transitive verbs in the preterite tense. Intransitive verbs don't require the "ne"
this was so good I subbed to your channel, I'm currently a Maya learner
Well, I understood almost half the video at the first try. Now I'll watch it four times more.
i kurdish we have a clitic which attaches to the end of a verb in its past tense indicating person ad number. this clitic can change however, depending on the verb. if the verb is transitive, the clitic indicates that the verb is acted by the agent. if the verb is intransitive, the clitic indicates that the verb acted upon the subject, somewhat treating it like an object of a transitive verb.
i love how quickly this escalates.
What I've been getting from your recent videos, is that nothing is set in stone when it comes to language, except maybe change over time.
Great video. Helpful with natlangs as much as with conlangs.
I was just thinking about how I wish you would make a video on ergativity, because it's something I'm curious to experiment with
Great video! Thanks!
A great video, helps with my conlanging, and my Latin GCSE. Thanks! PS, Internet fixed! Thanks for the support
I like finding comments with no likes and liking it so people think that the person who wrote the comment liked their own comment
Calm down, Satan.
Keep it civil.
Ein Typ
Be honest now, you do it too.
people do that to me all the time
Why wouldn't you upvote your own comment? Presumably you agree with what you said.
Finally someone who explains concepts clearly instead of obfuscating everything and assuming the audience have same level of knowledge as they do.
*The Powerpuff Girls?*
FIGHTING CRIME TRYING TO SAVE THE WORLD
The Powerpuff Girls (S) are fighting crime and (A)¹ trying to save the world (P) - ¹ agent is dropped
Of,kffkmgfk inn hni. N,ffff fc kfcf
@@enzogamerukbr ummm you ok over there? r/ihadastroke
@@charliebowditch7975 DO NOT R/IHADASTROKE ME!?!!1!1
Loving the examples
:)
>>> This was, by a wide margin, the best exposition of ergativity I have come across. I have never before been able to get my head around just what was going on in an ergative sentence and why. Maybe the explanations were poor: maybe I’m not as smart as I thought I was [I’m not quite sure about that colon a few words back. I think the “editorial “ square brackets are OK]. Your video was the breakthrough I had been looking for.
This my 15th watching this video. I understand! It all makes sense now..... Wow
Hey Edgar, my speakers are kind of low quality, could you tell me if you tend to produce your /θ/ as [t] or [tʰ] more often? It’s just rly bugging me that I can’t tell! Thanks :)
STRONK MOOSKLEES idk at 9:15, the initial consonant in “thought” sounds plosive, not fricative.
It sounds more unaspirated to me, although it's kinda relative anyways.
I actually don't know. It's probably inconsistent and might depend on the phonemes around the /θ/. I do know that when I emphasise things I tend to use /θ/ and not [t] or [tʰ].
It sounds to me like he treats TH like T and D most of the time, as if they were identical to English T and D, and only tends to say [þ] theta or thorn and [ð] eth/edh when he'd consciously emphasizing it. So t+h for initial consonants, t for medial and final and after S, and then d is d everywhere, which matches how T and D are in English. I notice he doesn't use th -> f, dh -> v, like in some UK English accents.9As opposed to US English, which doesn't do the f/v thing much.) -- I wish Edgar would cover Irish if he speaks it.
say "get"
in a quick speech I most likely would pronounce it like this > /gɛʔ/ or like this before a vowel > /gɛɾ/
you, on the other hand, like this /gɛθ̠/ where /θ̠/ is Voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative
UPD: "with this" probably like this > /wɪȡɪθ̠/ where /ȡ/ is Voiced alveolo-palatal stop
This is so interesting! Although Spanish is a nominative-accusative language, we literally say things like: "Her likes pizza" (she likes pizza) and "Me drops the key" (I drop the key). Only with some verbs, though. When we learn syntactical analysis at school, we struggle with those sentences because we tend to see "her, me" as subjects but we're taught they are actually direct objects.
Thank you so much! Very useful!
I watch this once a month and still have no clue what it’s about, great! 😬👍🏻