Ergativity Explained

Ever wondered how ergativity worked, well here's a basic video on it!

[thequantumcat]

I'm Basque, and this video somehow confused the shit out of 😅😂

[AdrianaGiacominni]

Simplifying and putting in a nutshell, ergativity is considering the accusative the center of meaning of a phrase, instead of the nominative. The emphasis is not on the actor, but on the receiver of the action

[alexzgreat]

Great video! Never knew there were two types of ergativity!

[LarthVolos]

Finnish has funny things reminding of ergativity. I must do = minun täytyy tehdä, where minun is accusative and verb täytyy is in passive. Not minä täydyn tehdä (minä nominative, täydyn 1.p.sg present). There's other things in Finnish similar. That gives an idea if Uralic was originally ergative language. We know that there were migration wave over the Urals to west. So has anybody studied whether Uralic languages and Ket (which is ergative language) are related.

[chappidopho]

At 0:31 the 'а' in 'людина' is actually the feminine ending. While it CAN be used as a nominative case, in that scenario it's used to denote the gender of the noun. In fact, I have yet to see ukranian mark any nouns for nominative.

[leo-zocp]

very nice video, it permits me a better understanding of ergativity, thank you :D

[fsbayer]

Great video! A question I have is, to what extent does semantic ergativity overlap with morphological ergativity in natlangs? So for example, are there natlangs where the following would be the case:

I see him. = Meaning: I see him.
Him sees. = Meaning: He is seen.

(And then to express the concept of "He sees" intransitive, you would have "Him sees" but with "sees" being marked as antipassive)

[pimenefusarund]

but isnt broke and cooking in this context like a slightly different word. Broke meaning the acting of breaking something and the act of breaking yourself. And in cooking its the act of preparing and putting it in the oven and the act of being in the oven and "cooking"? At least in my mind these feel like two different words almost

[spaghettiking]

5:45 I question whether this is really a form of ergativity, because it can really be applied to any transitive verb: having an object for transitive verbs is more or less optional; you can just as well say "the man kills" or "the man disembowels", and the object is not named at all, yet the sentence remains valid; this would surely make every verb in English able to be used ergatively, which I think is a weird explanation.

[FieldLing]

What did you use to edit this by the way?

[Adam-jrlx]

@1:30 hmm. idk. i dislike this video. To understand erg. it's best to NOT use pronouns and only use names + articles or particles.