Grammatical tidbits

[muckefuck]

I'm kinda between languages again. Seeing Iron Ladies 2 (สตรีเหล็ก 2) got me interested enough in Thai to carry around my books for a few days, but this morning I took them out and put in my Hindi and Punjabi grammars so I could make some comparisons. Last night, I downloaded some Coptic fonts at monshu's so I could take advantage of some online lessons, and today I spent some time browsing the crappy selection of similar sites for learning Kurdish.

I don't know how much vocabulary and such I'll retain, but I'll probably remember the following:

• Punjabi, like Hindi, is split ergative. This isn't too surprising, as in general the verbal systems are very similar, just as one might expect with two such closely-related languages. So far, the most obvious contrast is a full inflected past-tense paradigm for the Punjabi auxiliary verb hoṇa, whereas Hindi prefers a participle inflected for number and gender, but not person.
• I'm more surprised to find that Kurmancî (Northern Kurdish) is also split ergative (e.g. Ez te dibînim "I see you", Tu min dibînî "You see me" vs. Min te dîtim "I saw you"), especially since Central and Southern varieties aren't. It's probably no coincidence (although difficult to say which came first) that these other varieties also merge direct and oblique pronominal forms (e.g. Central Kurdish Min to debînem "I see you").
• Thai, like Chinese, has resultative compounds, e.g. คิดไม่ออก "can't work out" (lit. "think not issue"; cf. Ch. 想不出). I've been let down in the past expecting that my study of Chinese would give me a big leg up on learning other isolating languages like Vietnamese and Thai, so it's nice to see when something does carry over.