Sanskrit

[T.I. Console]

Selvakumar wrote:

>As I pointed out, it is a valid construction in Tamil to say
> Active:   nAn avaLukku paricu aLittEn
>             I     to her   prize  gave
>
>PassiveI: paricu ennAl avaLukku aLikkappaTTAtu
>             Prize  by me  for her  given
>
>PassiveII:  avaL ennAl paricu aLikkappaTTAL
>               She  by me  prize given

>I don't think Sandra van der Geer's claim* about Tamil based on
>K. Rangan's article (which I don't have access to at this moment)
>is valid.  If I'm missing something here please let me know.

Your posting did reach the list, and did reach me, but as I have a job which costs me five hours a day travelling, I'm often in a hurry when I read the discussions of the list. So, apologize if I failed to answer you. Your suggestion of passiveII sounds good. Maybe it depends on the kind of verb you use, but as to the occurrence of the characteristic, this makes no difference. Thus, looking at your sentence PassiveII, I'm inclined to say that IO to SU is possible in Tamil, and the same will probably be true for Kannada.

As you can read in my answer-posting to Eliot Stern, I also started to doubt the IO to SU `business' in Sanskrit. In that language it looks as if IO to SU is not possible at all, except for one exception (at least). This makes the following statement untrue:

> *Languages which do not allow movement/raising of IO to SU are IE Hindi, =
> German, Dutch and non-IE Tamil, Kannada.

Now it should be

Languages which do not allow movement/raising of IO to SU are IE Hindi, German, Dutch?, and Sanskrit. Languages which do so are non-IE Tamil, Kannada?, and Japanese. So far, the only exception to IE is English.

Everybody happy now?

Sandra van der Geer
Leiden, NL
info at ticonsole.nl