Personal Pronouns / Ergativity

[Eduard Selleslagh]

-----Original Message-----
From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Date: Tuesday, June 08, 1999 8:19 AM

>On Wed, 2 Jun 1999, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

>> In Basque (an agglutinating ergative language), both the ablative
>> and the ergative case contain the -k ending, which also occurs in
>> the nominative plural, in my view derived from a construction
>> implying a kind of 'genitivus/ablativus partitivus' (cf. French 'des
>> gens'; Lat. 'de' also had an 'ablative meaning'!).

>With respect, I don't think it's possible to relate any two of these
>three Basque inflectional endings.

[Ed Selleslagh]

Of course, I agree with you as far as the facts are concerned, and thank you
for explaining them in a much clearer and more complete way than I ever
could.

But I don't see how any of the facts actually contradicts my thesis; in fact
I think various of them corroborate it, as I will indicate in more detail
below.

>A native and ancient Basque lexical item never ends in a plosive, except
>in a few cases in which the final plosive is secondary.  In Basque of
>the historical period, however, several inflectional suffixes end in, or
>consist of, /t/ or /k/.  Some of these endings are clearly secondary,
>like first-singular /-t/ from earlier */-da/. while others are of
>unknown origin.  Possibly all are secondary.

>Ergative /-k/ is universal and attested in the 9th century.  There is no
>way of knowing if it derives from the reduction of something longer,
>since the ergative can never be followed by any other suffix.

>The ending /-tik/ is the most widespread ablative marker today, but it
>is clearly recent.  In addition to /-tik/, we also find /-ti/ in earlier
>Basque (still preserved today, I think, in some regions), /-ik/ in early
>texts,

[Ed]
Remember I also suggested that -ko might be or have been (in the composite
suffixes) the 'autonomous' form of -k, i.e. the origin of -k.

>and /-(r)ean/ in early Bizkaian.  In fact, all the local case
>suffixes exhibit significant variation in time and space, and there
>seems to me little doubt that the local case-endings are generally of
>recent origin in Basque.

[Ed]
Yes, they probably are, but they consist of constructions based upon a
series of old simple suffixes, combined in various ways, with regional
variations or preferences. Some don't use -k(o). The early Biskaian case
looks like a adverbial construction.

>The common ablative /-tik/ may well result from a combination of /-ti/
>with /-ik/, though there are problems with this.  In modern Basque,
>/-ik/ is strictly the partitive ending, but its early attestation as an
>ablative suggests that it may have originated as an ablative and then
>become specialized as a partitive after the rise of other ablative
>endings.

[Ed]
That is exactly one of the things I suggested.

>Complications: old Bizkaian, which has ablative /-(r)ean/, consistently
>uses /-ti/ to mean `by way of', `via', which may therefore have been the
>earlier function of /-ti/.  And both ablative /-tik/ and partitive /-ik/
>have extended forms /-tika/ and /-ika/, respectively; these longer forms
>may well be conservative.

[Ed]
Exactly.  I suggested -ko, but -ka might do as well, or be a variant or a
compound of -ko and something else.

>The absolutive (not nominative) plural /-k/ is the most interesting of
>all.  We find plural /-k/ only in the absolutive, which generally has
>case-marker zero, while all the oblique cases exhibit an apparent plural
>marker /-e-/.  One possibility is that the plural marker was originally
>*/-g/, with devoicing to /-k/ in final position in the absolutive.  In
>this view, the addition of a further overt case-suffix of any kind
>triggered the automatic Basque insertion of /-e-/ to separate this
>*/-g-/ from a following consonant, and then the medial */-g-/, being
>invariably intervocalic, simply dropped (as is common in Basque),
>leaving only the originally non-morphological /-e-/ as the apparent
>marker of plurality in the oblique cases.

[Ed]
Yes, this is really the full version of the story (cf. also Iñaki Agirre's
posting), but I fail to see how this could contradict my thesis that the 'k'
is actually an 'ablative-partitive' marker; It rather looks like an
explanation why the originally present 'k/g' is now absent in all other
plural cases.  The alternation k-g is contextual and of no basic
importantance to this matter, in my view.

>But note something curious: it is trivial to reconstruct an earlier
>stage of Basque in which the plural marker /-k/ (or whatever it was)
>occurs *nowhere* but in the three demonstratives.  Even in modern
>Basque, this /-k/ occurs only in the three demonstratives, in the
>ordinary (`definite') article, which itself plainly derives from a
>reduction of the distal demonstrative, and (in some varieties)
>pleonastically after the indefinite plural suffix /-zu/.  An example of
>the last is provided by /bat/ `one, a' (< */bade/), plural /batzu/
>`some, several', extended pleonastically to /batzuk/ in some varieties.
>Plural /-k/ occurs nowhere else at all.

[Ed]
Your previous paragraph explains a lot of that.

>Not sure what all this means, but ablative /-tik/ and ablative/
>partitive /-ik/ cannot possibly be identified with either ergative /-k/
>or absolutive plural /-k/, and it seems most unlikely that these last
>two can be identified with each other.

[Ed]
I fail to see how this follows from what you said before: it seems to lead
to quite the opposite. But that's my interpretation of the facts, of course.

I hope the moderator and the IE-ists will forgive us this digression into
Basque territory. At least it shows the problems there are comparable to the
IE ones in this context.

Ed.