Peshpeg: Difference between revisions

Peshpeg is classified as an SOV language, with an ergative-absolutive morphosyntactic alignment. The language apparently had an extensive vowel harmony system, which has been preserved to some extent in its present-day form.  Aglugginative and fusional features appear in various areas of the grammar.  The verb system distinguishes tense, aspect, number, and person.  Interestingly two verbal subsystems co-exist, one reflecting an older nominative-accusative system, and the other reflecting an ergative-absolutive system.  Although most ergative-absolutive languages are split, rarely does the split occur based on source language; splits in ergative languages typically occur based on tense/aspect (as in various Iranian languages, notably Kurdish), free versus bound pronominal forms (as in the Minhast dialects of the Salmonic Branch, and certain Australian languages like Murinypata), and clause types (e.g. Yup'ik, Inuktitut, and other Eskimoan languages).  The nominative-accusative subsystem is limited to a handful of verbs, mostly auxiliary verbs such as ''rui'' "to do" and ''joa/jora'' "to go" (used to express the future tense), as well as one perceptual verb, ''bu'' "to see".  But even within this system some forms, such as all of the plural forms of the non-present tenses, forms of the ergative-absolutive subsystem appear.  The newer ergative-absolutive system employs an auxiliary verb plus a verbal noun.  The older subsystem has agreement markers for only the subject, whereas the newer subsystem bears obligatory polypersonal marking on the auxiliary.