Basque ergativity: murder is just transitive death

A more fundamental difficulty is the word order. Take the following example:

Ah, that's just Chinese.

Chinese lacks relative pronouns, so...

yòng zìxingchē qù xiǎoxué de háizi

use self-go-cart GOTO school _ child

the child who goes to school by ( = using a) bike

From what little I've read about Basque, the attribute-marking particle de translates fine into -ko, as in Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea. The difference is just that Chinese lacks a genitive (or any other trace of case other than the existence of prepositions) and therefore uses it more often.

Thanks for the link.  Yes, my example is bizarre, but that's because fully general ergativity is bizarre to anglophones.  We have our own bizarre feature, and that's instrument-subject sentences like The hammer destroyed the doghouse as an alternative to John destroyed the doghouse with a hammer.

But if you translate my example Cthulhu ate John and died word for word into Basque (well, putting the words in the correct order, of course), who is it that died?

I found another bizarre explanation of ergativity here: how Basques are supposed to understand the phrase: Cthulhu ate him and died. IMO, there's no way to understand it in Basque, because that's not Basque, it's English.

Actually, if you think about it, we can sort of use a pseudo ergative-absolutative construction in IE languages. It's probably easiest to see in Latin.

"The window broke" > Fenestra rupit.
"The boy broke the window" > Puer rupit fenestram. (accusative form).

However, we can also use a pseudo ergative-absolutive form for this same sentence:
> Fenestra puero rupit. (ergative form). Puero "boy" is in ablative case, so literally it says, "the window broke by/from the boy".

Thank you for your interesting and educational posting on Basque ergativity. For an self-inflicted project have been trying to get a basic idea of Basque grammar.  It’s hard for me, as an English-speaking American, to get my head around Basque. Your examples with the dead parrot, and the other Monty Python references, made me chuckle.

hi guys

as a person about to emigrate to St Just Ibarre and starting on the road to learning the tongue of the basque nation any tips of a good home study lingual format tapes CD's etc

as you can see i am irish gaeilge speaking and english but living in the territory would like to merge into the culture

thanks

peadar eoin macgearailt 

The problem with your example, I think, is the past tense, harder to master than present tense forms. Tri-personal form agreement as in genizkizuen not a problem. My daughter produces didazu quite well, but instead of the all-the-way-round correct zenidan past form, I've heard her say didazun, with a final -n that she interprets (I guess) as a past tense form. From there, children tend to go to zidazun, another reguralised form (not heard from Lili so far)... Zenidan or genizkizuen sound like cult forms, and I doubt if they can be produced very spontaneously.

Yep, Austin TX. My daughter Riyo (almost five) was a monolingual Japanese speaker until about three and a half. She's pretty fluent in English now (thanks to preschool), but what's fascinating is that when she gets excited or upset she sometimes uses Japanese word order when speaking English: "Yesterday grandma bought me skirt I want to wear today!"

What I don't understand is how little Basque kids can master the verbs. How old do you have to be to spontaneously (and correctly) produce something like "liburuak erakutsi genizkizuen"?

Learning Basque from Austin, Texas? Wow! I deal with a monolingual Basque every day, my daughter Lili. Poor lexic yet, but correct word order and ergative construction (she turned 3 on october).

That's a good joke, yes. I knew it, but I dind't recall for this post... I knew Wheylona finally last friday. She came to our house. Internet does not isolate people, it connects people.

I'm clearly going to have to actually start leaning more Basque than: kaixo, agur, lanak and the numbers 1-7 before I will truly understand your and Wheylona's comments, but they do whet my appetite. When I came to Spain, I thought I'd also learn Basque, Catalan and Gallego, but didn't allow for the fact that I would actually have to work for a living and not have unlimited time.

I leave you with a silly joke that always makes me laugh, and is tangentally related to your example. You can tell it in English or Spanish, but one line has got to be in Spanish, as you will see.

So, a woman is in a pet shop looking around when she sees this lovely parrot. She thinks to herself, "Why that would be a lovely pet. It's low maintenance and can also keep you company."

It's quite a posh pet shop, though, and she's worried it might be a little out of her price range. So, she turns to the young girl working there and asks, "¿Es cara la cacatua?"

The salesgirl looks a little alarmed and replies, "I'm so sorry, ma'am, but I don't speak Basque!"

It kind of makes sense and seems logical really.

Not that I even tried to understand it, but in your Sustatu article about Welsh blogging, my name appeared as Rhysek and Rhys Wynnek, and this explains why.

Good luck to Wheylona in her efforts to become fluent.  She might take inspiration form fellow American bloggers who have learnt Welsh: <a href="http://aderyncan.blogspot.com/">Zoe</a>, <a href="http://mochyndaear.blogspot.com">Robert</a> (Robert is Welsh but learnt after moving to the USA), <a href="http://castell-tywod.blogspot.com">Janis</a>, <a href="http://jcortese.livejournal.com/">Sarah</a>,<a href="http://cymrympls.blogspot.com">Tom</a> and <a href="http://chriscopecymraeg.blogspot.com">Chris</a> who's actually moved to Wales and started a degree course studying Welsh.

Excuse the comment on the very old thread (an internet month is how many dog years? <g>), but as someone studying Basque, I can tell you the ergativity is by far not the most difficult part of studying the language. Ergativity is quirky, like a weird uncle who always makes jokes, but it's nevertheless understandable. A more fundamental difficulty is the word order. Take the following example:

[1]Bizikletan [2]eskolara [3]joaten den [4]mutila.

In English (and Spanish), the order would be the opposite:

[4]The boy [3]who goes [2]to school [1]by bike.

The opposite: let that sink in... What that means is that to learn to produce that kind of construction, you have to learn to think backwards! <cue scary movie music>.

Incidentally, this kind of construction is called left-branching, since the relative clause comes before (i.e., to the left) of the head, or noun(-phrase) it is modifying. Left-branching languages are not that unusual, either, although to the left-branching Basques surrounded on all sides by right-branching Indo-Europeans, it might seem like they are all alone in the world. Japanese, for one, has very similar word order to Basque (left-branching, post-positions): [1]Jitensha de [2]gakko ni [3]kayou [4]otoko no ko. In fact, if all Basques weren't already bilingual in an Indo-European language (how I would like to meet a monolingual Basque!), Japanese might be easier for them to learn than Spanish or French.

Anyway, just to say that ergativity is the least of the Basque-learner's troubles, especially when it's described as engagingly as you did in this post. <g>

I agree. In fact, before she came to Spain, I had only met Wheylona once. It's a friend-of-a-friend thing. But now I feel like we really know each other and she's coming down to Mad this weekend for a big birthday bash I'm having. We have to control the computers, not vice versa.