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Basque Linguistics William H. Jacobsen, Jr., coordinator of linguistics in the Basque Studies Program, presented a paper to the 44th annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in San Francisco on December 29, 1969, entitled “The Analog of the Passive Transformation in Ergative-Type Languages.” This dealt with the structural type of language to which Basque belongs (see Dr. Jacobsen’s explanation on p. 7 of the first issue of this Newsletter), using examples from Basque and other languages. Some scholars have thought that languages of this type are more primitive than others because they seem to express statements in a way that is analogous to the passive voice in a language such as English, and correspondingly to lack the possibility of offering a choice between expressing oneself in either the active or the passive voice. The paper disagreed with this interpretation and attempted to show that these ergative-type languages are no more primitive than others when looked at from an appropriate point of view. |
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