I’m not a bonafide linguist, but I’ve studied a dozen languages—some formally, some informally, some only on a surface level, some deep enough that I’ve needed to dip my toes into proper linguistics to go further. While I’m sure the iceberg goes deeper than I’ll ever know, the one topic I still haven’t gotten even a basic grasp on is ergativity, which is wild because *apparently* it’s a main feature of many languages. I would say I get the gist of it, but that’s not even true. At best, I know which parts of speech it involves, and I won’t even say that out loud because I may well be wrong.
So, my basic question is: What is ergativity?
From there:
– What are some examples of it in different languages?
– And what is its linguistic counterpart called, as in, if a language does not display ergativity, what *does* it have?
You don’t have to explain it like I’m five, more like I’m that guy at work who’s approaching retirement age that saw you scroll TikTok once and now wants you to explain what “griddying” is. I’m 27, but I think that method might be best.
Thanks!
In: 13
If you were describing a guy being burned (gross but memorable example) you could do it two ways:
* He burns.
* She burns him.
In both sentences the man is burning but the pronoun representing the guy is different. English demands this difference because it’s nominative-accusative – subjects are assigned one case, objects a different case. But what if instead English went like this:
* Him burns.
* She burns him.
Then English would be an ergative-absolutive language. In an ergative-absolutive language, the subject of an intransitive verb is assigned the same case as the object of a transitive verb.
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