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Conlangery #36: Morphosyntactic Alignment

Conlangery Podcast

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The Ergative Absolute of Languages

The ergative absolute of languages occur in about a sixth, one over six of the languages on the planet. There is naturally occurring a small number of languages that mark the subject and object of a transitive verb the same then give a different marking to the intransitive subject. The conlangers call this the monster raving loony alignment. It's not unusual that nouns behave differently than first and second person pronouns. But there are maybe two languages, naturally occurring languages that have this across the entire language.

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