quote:

---

Thralni: I grow tired of explaining the same thing over and over again, especially since you consistently mis-read what I've said (I asked you the Dutch name of an English pronoun case, not the Dutch name of something in Dutch, etc.). I'll leave it at this: your cases (several of them) are named to suggest uses that are quite different from what your descriptions and examples suggest their uses are. Either your names are misleading, or your descriptions and examples are.

---

quote:

---

I never answered your question because I started critiquing your website before you asked the question. (And the reason that I've been using italics is that you've been giving me the impression that you don't read what I write unless I highlight the important parts. [Razz] )

---

quote:

---

Likewise, seriously, before you go any farther, give the language a better name than "Nephilian." The name is improper for many reasons, not the least of which is that it sounds terrible and suggests that they're from Nephilia.

---

quote:

---

To answer your question: I think you'd be much better off leaving out the "two-participant" description entirely. Leave it out of the summary and description of the ergative. Also, I'd take out the reference to the nominative, because it doesn't really help either (the whole point is that it's not like a nom-acc language).

---

quote:

---

In your second example sentence for the absolutive, why is "with the dog" even there? Leave it out. It needlessly looks like an object.

---

quote:

---

Give an example sentence under the ergative. It could be the same as before, "The man picks the fruit," but just highlight the subject instead of the object.

---

quote:

---

But I had a thought: if the nephil word for "nephil" is "nephil," that would almost certainly mean that the nephil plural has to be "nephilim." No English-speaker would invent that plural; it must be borrowed from something. In your version of this history, where does that plural come from?

---

quote:

---

Do what I asked. Give me a citation for a book or a scholarly article stating that in Sumerian the genitive is only used for possession. That way, I can go look it up in the research archives at the university. It doesn't need to be online. (And if the book or article is not in English, that's fine too.)

---

quote:

---

The problem is that transitive verbs and intransitive verbs are two different groups of verbs. Regular verbs and irregular verbs are two different groups of verbs. Finite and infinite verbs are two different groups of particular verb forms... but you can't logically separate out types of verbs after you separate out verb forms. Once you separate out groups of verb forms, you are no longer dealing with entire verbs, you are dealing with verb forms!

Furthermore... looking at the verb page, it seems that your explanation of what finite and non-finite verbs are is really misleading. A verb form is classified as "finite" or "non-finite" based on the presence of markers specifying person, number, gender, and so on. It does not matter whether the markers are prefixes or suffixes or pronouns! In English, the suffixes are mostly other information. In Nephilian, however, they are always part of the suffixes!

---

quote:

---

Perfect evidence of this confusion is in your table showing how a finite verb is constructed. How can a finite verbal form be an infinitive? That is a contradiction.

---

quote:

---

All suffixes written above come after the verb, which keeps the infinitive suffix. That is done to make it more clear by which group the verb belongs.

---

quote:

---

Emphatically, no. Foreign words must be italicized in English. Foreign words always take foreign plurals. Fully assimilated borrowed words — words that were previously foreign but are now considered part of the English language — are not italicized. They may take either their original foreign plural ("nephilim") or the standard English plural ("nephils").

---

quote:

---

Thralni, will you do something for me? Find a book on English grammar written in Dutch. Find the part on pronoun case (the bit that talks about the difference between "I" and "me"). Tell me what the Dutch name of the case of the word "my" is.

---

quote:

---

Also, for the record, I've never been responding to your question about what we think of the description of the absolutive case. I've been responding to the errors on your site.

---

quote:

---

Almost any book about ancient near eastern language is written for a specialized audience. General overviews are no exceptions. First-year graduate students in such a field are expected to have (or to very quickly pick up) a WEALTH of knowledge on the subject that 99.99% of the world does not have. It is absurd for you to claim that any material giving technical details about the language is written for a general audience. It's not.

---

quote:

---

I am a little confused about this persistent disagreement over the genitive. I assume your mother knows what she's talking about, but it's strange that my sources disagree. Is it possible that this is some kind of discrepancy between English and Dutch? Alternately, can you point me to a bibliographic reference to a book, article, whatever which states that Sumerian has a genitive which is only used for possession?

---

quote:

---

Interrogatives are a really good example: many languages have more than one way of marking an utterance as a question, including those that rely on inserting words, on changing word order, on prosody, and so on. Often, these different ways are mostly interchangeable. Does that render any of them useless? No!

---

quote:

---

What you go on to contrast here is the difference between an ergative-absolutive language and a nominative-accusative language. However, what you SAY you are contrasting is the difference between an ergative language and "a standard Indo-European language." Basically you say the above phrase in place of saying "a nom-acc language" — very misleading.

---

quote:

---

EVERY verb is either transitive, or intransitive. EVERY verb is either regular, or irregular.

---

quote:

---

They are two binary features which are completely unrelated. Your chart clearly suggests that if a verb is irregular, it isn't transitive or intransitive.

---

quote:

---

Now that you have explained the meaning of bipartite/multipartite, the names make more sense. It's still a really weird naming convention, and I am confused as to what the discrepancy between those two types of verbs is supposed to add to the language, anyway.

---

quote:

---

Originally written by ben12C8:

Just erase all that gunky fabricated code and type:

<img src="nephilian_verbal_group.jpg" width="423" height="141" border="0">

Make sure the image is uploaded in the same directory as the page that displays the image and rename the image file to nephilian_verbal_group and make sure it's a .jpg file. Underscores are a lot better than spaces, which get translated to %20 and don't look as good.

EDIT: This, of course, if your image does not yet work.

---

quote:

---

Thralni: I've been saying the same thing since my first post on the subject: either your genitive includes a partitive genitive, or the your genitive is actually a possessive. Please read more carefully.

---

quote:

---

"Nephils" is correct because the standard English plural (adding -s) is always correct, even if another form is also correct. (See "octopus," "octopuses," "octopodes.")

---

quote:

---

Your website says that the "instrumentative" is not used for a partitive genitive. I'm just saying that you should take that line out, because it isn't necessary: an instrumental is never used for a partitive genitive. The sentence is redundant, not incorrect.

---

quote:

---

Thralni, you ask us for feedback, and then when you get it you deflect it by saying everything is going to change anyway. If you're not ready to get the feedback yet don't ask for it.

---

quote:

---

— not true. I don't know about Hurrian, but for Sumerian see for example this partial grammar, which states (my italics): "the genitive case codes any relation between two noun phrases, including possession, location and composition as well as a variety of extended syntactic functions." But I am skeptical, with Kel, that Hurrian scholars would possibly call it the genitive if it is only used for possessive functions!

---

quote:

---

Looking at the anatomy of a cat's mouth sounds like a cool idea. Don't forget, though, that nephils in A1-4 seem to be capable of producing most English words with minimal phonetic alterations, so their mouth probably isn't too different from a human's.

---

quote:

---

Thralni, I think some of the confusion in your writing is not caused by bad understanding of English, but simply by sloppy translating! In your nouns page by the part on [a] and [ina] markers, you say: "Some cases can only be used with animate, some only with animate, and some with both." I think what you meant to say is "Some NOUNS can only be used with animate, some only with INANIMATE, and some with both."
This is a small error, but these small errors ruin a grammar!

---

quote:

---

It is probably worth noting that most Indo-European languages are Nom-Acc languages, however, the two terms are NOT the same thing, so talking about the enormous difference between ergative and Indo-European languages is really misleading.

---

quote:

---

If I understand you right, the difference between "bipartite" and "multipartite" verbs is that multipartites have 4 possible suffixes, whereas bipartites have 3 -- the person and number suffixes are combined into one. Right? In that case why the HECK are they called BIpartite and MULTIpartite?

---

quote:

---

Like Kel said, you need to stop using postposition. A suffix that indicates person, number, tense, or voice is presumably not ever used as its own word in a sentence, so it is not a postposition! Pro-dropped subjects are not postpositions, either!

---

quote:

---

It seems weird to me that you are using pro-drop on the SUBJECT despite making the language ergative-absolutive. I guess that would make the language one that employs partial ergativity. This is one of the few ways in which ergative languages really *are* messier.

---

quote:

---

Also, in the chart, it looks like you are saying irregular verbs are neither transitive nor intransitive. Is that true? Because that makes no sense!

---

quote:

---

"The difference between the normal bipartite-group and irregular verbs, is the way the stem and the ending are formed. The stem changes, and the ending adapts to that, sometimes getting totally different verbs in comparison to the infinitive."
— Totally different verbs?!? Do you mean "different-looking endings"? This is *really* unclear. If you don't want to explain it better in the introduction, you are better served by just referring the reader to a later section. That last sentence is spectacularly confusing.

---

quote:

---

"Only the four most necessary tenses exist."
— That's a bit of a value judgment. Also, it seems counterintuitive that aspect is only used for the past tense, not for present or future.

---

quote:

---

...Slartucker, who hopes that his comments are helpful, but fears that they are not

---

quote:

---

My guess would be that you are reading highly technical books about languages like Sumerian and Hurrian, which are read by a very tiny pool of highly specialized scholars! They probably assume a broad base of knowledge both about the ancient near east and about general linguistics.

---

quote:

---

I understand that the verb stuff is an introduction, but I don't understand what the point of any of it is. Maybe it will become more clear when you write the rest of it.

---

quote:

---

Latin and Greek have nothing to do with it. If your language has a proper genitive, it will express the "of milk" with the genitive. If it doesn't, then your so-called "genitive" is a possessive case. These words mean something independent of the languages in which they are used.

---

quote:

---

nephils

---

quote:

---

Likewise, a genitive case must be used at least for the possessive genitive and the partitive genitive to be a real genitive case. It's a linguistic definition that spans all languages. There are languages that don't have real genitive cases; these languages have possessive cases. English is one of them (for pronouns).

---

quote:

---

But my point was that you say under the "instrumentative" case (which isn't a word in English, which is how I know that it has to be an instrumental) that the "instrumentative" isn't used to express "of" things. This is needless and confusing. In no language that I've ever heard of would one use the instrumental to express the partitive genitive.

---

quote:

---

My knowledge of general linguistics is not limited to Latin and Greek, so please disabuse yourself of that notion.

---

quote:

---

The genitive case expresses ownership or "zuhörigkeit"*

---