accusative and ergative languages

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

"Patrick C. Ryan" <proto-language at email.msn.com> wrote:

>And to answer your -- I hope not purposeful -- distortion of what I wrote,
>let me say explicitly that I did not assert "there are ergative languages
>without (any) splits". I asserted that Thomsen did not, at least in her
>grammar, identify splits in Sumerian, which you seemed to think she had.

Of course she has, unless your edition differs from mine: p. 51,
paragraph 42:

	On the morphological level Sumerian has thus an ergative
 	system in the nouns and the intransitive vs. the
	transitive hamTu conjugation [...]. In the pronouns and
	the transitive maru^ conjugation vs. the intransitive
	verb, on the other hand, the system is nominative-
	accusative [...].
	This `split ergativity' is no uncommon phenomenon, in
	fact no ergative language is entirely ergative in both
	syntax and morphology.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl