Мы с Андреем

[pne]

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!

Comments

[n-true.livejournal.com]

I wonder if other Austronesian languages like Hawaiian and Maori also use this construction. My (rather small) Hawaiian dictionary doesn't say anything about this...

By the way, the ergative marker seems to be identical to the absolutive marker. Am I right? It looks as if the e divides the verb from the subject and the subject from the object.

Ergative and absolutive articles

[pne.livejournal.com]

By the way, the ergative marker seems to be identical to the absolutive marker. Am I right?

No; the example is misleading in this respect.

There are two sets of articles: one for common nouns and one for proper nouns and pronouns.

Common noun articles are he for ergative and e for absolutive; proper noun/pronoun articles are e for ergative and a for absolutive.

It appears that in Niuean, there are a number of particles which are homophonous but have different functions; besides marking absolutive for common nouns and ergative for pronouns, for example, e is also used in noun phrases after numbers (ue e kulī, "two dogs") and after some other particles. A is also used when preposing possessive phrases (ko e fale ha mautolu "our house, a house of ours" --> ko (e) ha mautolu a fale "our house").

He, in particular, seems to mean all sorts of things, which makes understanding Niuean sentences a bit confusing for me sometimes. Ai can also be pretty bad.

Re: Ergative and absolutive articles

[pne.livejournal.com]

As for "e" dividing verb from subject and subject from object, compare:

Kua kai e taua e tau uga
PERF eat ERG we.two ABS PL crab
We two have eaten crabs

with

Kua kai he tau uga a taua
PERF eat ERG PL crab ABS we.two
Crabs have eaten us two

[pthalo]

In Hungarian it's "János és én" (John and I) and the verb is first person plural (mentünk). Or really I'd say "mentünk Jánossal" which is "we went with John" literally, but it's "john and i went"

Hungarian

[pne.livejournal.com]

Or really I'd say "mentünk Jánossal" which is "we went with John" literally, but it's "john and i went"

Cool! So Hungarian does this kind of thing, too.

[nakedcelt.livejournal.com]

Māori has a similar construction, but even more curious.

For instance, to say "My brother and I eat kumara", the phrase is:

E kai kūmara ana māua ko taku teina.

Analysis:

E ... ana : habitual (in some dialects also continuous)

kai kūmara : eat kūmara — the lack of case markers and articles indicates that "eating kūmara" is a verbal phrase, rather than verb + object

māua : 1duEx

ko : copula used in stative sentences (I'm not sure if that's the correct term; I mean sentences which, in English, would have "to be" as the main verb) where the complement is a proper or a definite noun

taku teina : my younger-same-sex-sibling

To convey the construction in translation you'd have to say something like "We — that is, my brother and I — eat kumara."