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Stupid mouse

Grrrr. My mouse cursor is acting up again—starting to move horizontally all by itself, or refusing to move horizontally when I move the mouse.

Changing the batteries fixed this last time—but I just changed them a week ago. A mouse should not go through a set of batteries in one week, even if it's a wireless mouse.

Мы с Андреем

In English or German, when talking about two people doing something together (one of them being myself), I'd say something along the lines of John and I went to the beach / Karl und ich waren gestern in München—that is, with "I" in the singular.

However, I learned that Russian uses, instead, a construction of the form Мы с Андреем: literally, "we with Andrew" rather than "Andrew and I".

So I was interested to read that Niuean apparently also uses this form; an example sentence in Seiter's Studies in Niuean Syntax reads:

Kini	e	maua	mo	Maka	e	māla
clear	Erg	we,Du,Ex	with	Maka	Abs	plantation
'Maka and I are clearing the plantation'

"We(two) with Maka" for "Maka and I" looks like the same construction as Russian uses. Nifty!

Did you know...

...that Niuean can promote an instrument to be a direct object of a sentence?

A sentence such as Kua tā he tama e tau fakatino aki e malala "The child has been drawing pictures with a charcoal" can have the direct object e tau fakatino "pictures" incorporated into the verb leaving the subject, which is marked with absolutive, rather than ergative case: Kua tā fakatino e tama aki e malala "The child has been drawing pictures with a charcoal".

However, the sentence can also drop the aki "with" and promote the instrument to be a direct object; the subject retains its ergative case marking while the instrument is marked as a direct object: Kua tā fakatino he tama e malala "The child has been drawing pictures with a charcoal".