Mark:
>Basque (and its ancestors) is unrelated to any other known language >group.
Well... that depends on who you talk to. There are many languages that can
be called "isolate" groups (Japanese, Korean, Ainu...) but this is somewhat
based on opinion and others will claim otherwise based on proof of positive
that, in a perfect world, would counteract the lack of proof of a negative.
Japanese for instance might by some be considered an isolate... or it could
be an Altaic language related to Turkish and Mongolian. Is Etruscan a sister
language to IndoEuropean or are we to continue to claim that its origins are
a mystery despite a list of connections? Toe-may-toe, toe-mah-tah.
I would say that it's best to take the likeliest connection rather than no
connection at all. In long-range comparative linguistics, Basque is viewed
as part of the Dene-Caucasian grouping. Even so, the relationships between
Basque and other DC languages like North-West Caucasian, North-East
Caucasian, Burushaski-Yeneseian, Sino-Tibetan and Na-Dene are certainly
remote, spanning into tens of thousands of years of seperation.
Georgian on the other hand is known to stem from Proto-Kartvelian (which had
in fact interacted with IE of all things and the ubiquitous East Semitic).
Kartvelian is thought to be in turn, derived from Proto-Nostratic. Basque is
NOT considered to be Nostratic by most linguists.
My own view is that Nostratic (a 15,000 year old language itself) is in turn
probably a Dene-Caucasian language, meaning that the grouping is a good
25,000 years old at least. (Apparently, John C Kerns has already proposed
this.)
However, even on this speculative angle, we could only say that Basque and
Georgian are remotely related and vastly seperated by at these 25,000 years,
making any similarities quite meager at best. Relation is relative, I always
say ;)
Mark:
>The usual contrast between nominative and accusative, and how the >verb
>connects the two, as well as how the verb relates to what we >term
>'passivity' and 'transitivity', is quite different in an >ergative
>language.
Ah, yes, how I love ergative languages. This is what makes them fun.
So in an example like "I love" (a verb without an explicit object or an
"intransitive" verb), "I" would be absolutive. In "I love you" (a
"transitive" verb because there IS an object), "you" is absolutive and "I"
is ergative.
Basically, it's easier to just repeat to yourself like a mantra the
following: "the ergative is the subject of a transitive sentence, the
ergative is the subject of a transitive sentence,..." The rest is absolutive
or some other noun case. If you think Basque is hard, try Burushaski where
you have to conjugate for the "experiencer" of an action as well. Then
there's Swahili and word classes but that will be lesson number #342. :)
- gLeN
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