>For a discussion on the ergative nature of PIE see
>http://www.dabis.at/Anwender.htm/Alscher/contents.htm
>
>Glen, any chance that Nostratic was also ergative?
Yes, good ol' Joachim. It's a good link but I'm not completely hep on some
of his conclusions.
Nostratic had to have been ergative in my view to account for Kartvelian
grammar and for two sets of pronouns that existed in Nostratic which seem to
function as absolutive and oblique (this is a synthesis of my own
extrapolation, Bomhard's insight and some points mentioned by Bomhard
concerning Greenberg's other pronominal adventures which may indeed have a
basis of truth despite Bomhard's seeming atheism). If we divide Nostratic
into three branches (Kartvelian, Afro-Asiatic, and Eurasiatic [including
Sumerian, Elamite, Dravidian]) then we see that only Eurasiatic has
accusative languages. Eurasiatic is the innovator. Even AfroAsiatic appears
to be ergative.
According to Bomhard in "Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis", John C
Kerns thought Nostratic was an accusative language with three nominal
declensions based on what is existant in IE. The first problem with this is
that it is clear that Nostratic was a highly _analytic_ language (like
Chinese), not synthetic at all. The second problem is that, aside from IE
connections, this grammatical hypothesis doesn't explain the rest of
Nostratic grammar which inevitably gets into ergativity. No Nostratic
declensional suffixing can be reconstructed because it is pretty clear that
the relationship of a noun to a sentence was established only with
postpositions, something like in Japanese (basu de "on the bus"). Examples
of these postpositions would be *da "with", *ta "from", *ci "to", etc. which
survive well into Steppe.
- gLeN
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