Talk:Noun cases

Hi,

I know Frommer uses the terms 'agentive', 'patientive', etc., but that is nonstandard. Agentive/patientive are the cases of "split-S" systems, which Na'vi is not. As for "subjective", it implies the existence of a subject, which in turn implies the existence of a nominative--that is, the language would need to be syntactically nominative-accusative, which it possibly is, but also have conflated the nominative with topicality, and in any case the "subjective" is not used for any such case. AFAIK the expected terms for a tripartite language are ergative, accusative, and intransitive case. --kwami 08:47, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

Frommer's use of terms may be nonstandard in general linguistics, but I have no idea if he has studied some language that has settled on its own terms for things (a common enough occurrence). Regardless, for articles on this wiki, it seems best to use Frommer's terminology as much as possible. Once more official material is released, we can adjust to whatever terminology those works use. Wm.annis 16:02, 27 December 2009 (UTC)