10 questions about Nahuat-l and the Aztecs

[MishaGMCLA at aol.com]

CHMuths at aol.com writes:

1. The material I got speak of Nahuat-l as aglutinant language. What does it

mean?

Agglutinating languages generally have large numbers of suffixes, less often
prefixes, which can be used to pile meanings and relationships into a single
word.  I know Hungarian better than its relative Finnish; I've made a
Hungarian speaker laugh with my concoction "zongorazhatatlanak" "unplayable
on the piano"

zongora-    "piano"
-az-    verb-forming suffix, hence zongoraz "to play piano"
-hat-   potential form "-able"
-atlan- "without", but following -hat- has the meaning of "un-do-able"
-ak plural ending (nouns and adjectives)


anthony.appleyard at umist.ac.uk writes:

>(Off-topic PS : please what is an "ergative language"? Everybody uses
>the word and nobody says what it means.)

A favorite subject --or should I say topic-- of mine.  Ergativity has to do
with subject, object and agent cases, where "case" is the relationship of
nouns to the verb of the sentence, in many languages indicated by endings, pre
positions or postpositions on the nouns.

In most actions there are an Agent and a Patient:

the Agent is the actor, the one providing the impetus to make the action
happen.

the Patient is generally the direct object, the thing undergoing or feeling
the direct effects of the action.

The opposite of "ergative" and the more common construction among languages
is called "nominative-accusative."  In these languages, the Subject is
generally the Patient in intransitive sentences ("John died"), while in
transitive sentences ("Bill killed John"), the Subject is the Agent and the
Object the Patient.

Ergative languages (for example Basque, Georgian, some Polynesian) use the
Subject case for the Patient in both kinds of sentences, with the Agent
marked differently in transitive sentences ("John died at-the-hands-of
Bill").  These constructions could be analyzed as passive forms, especially
if the normal word order is Patient before Agent ("John was-killed by-Bill"),
resulting in such exaggerations as saying Basque uses only the passive voice.

I don't know how clear that explanation was, or how relevant this discussion
is to a language without overt case markings. I'm always pleased to run
across ergativity in an unexpected place like Tonga.

Misha Schutt
M.A. Linguistics, Indiana University
now a librarian and amateur linguist