Does the term 'Ablative Absolute' mean anything to anyone here?

[qwertyMike]

[TrogL]

1. Space capsules

have ablative coverings on the heat shield. They wear off as it re-enters.

[TrogL]

2. However,

I suspect's it's a grammar thing

[LearnedHand]

3. "ablative" is a Latin grammatical case

(i.e., a declension), but I don't know what your term means.

[Wonk]

5. Should there be a law prohibiting the burning of them?

;-)

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=ablative%20absolute

[qwertyMike]

6. I had a 'Classical Education' (nerd)

and i was looking thru old books while re-packing.
Latin - ya know "Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est"
and stuff

The term Ablitave Absolute sprung to mind.

We used to use that term referring to psychotic rugby players.

[Gingersnap]

4. you sure it's not ablative absolutive?

I am a linguist and I've not heard of absolute as a grammatical term. Absolutive is. In what context did you encounter this?

[qwertyMike]

7. google

An Ablative Absolute phrase is used when a thought, condition or action is grammatically separate but modifies the meaning of the rest of the sentence. The ablative absolute is sometimes called an adverbial phrase because it modifies the whole sentence as an adverb modifies the action of a verb. We use absolute adverbial phrases in English too: 'They had a pleasant trip, all things considered.'

and

"Nuntio misso dux dormivit per nocte" ('A messenger having been sent, the general slept through the night'). The noun-participle phrase tells us the sequence of events. It also suggests causation -- that the general was able to sleep soundly because a messenger had been sent.

[qwertyMike]

9. Or

The Who were an excellent band, despite Keith Moon

[foo_bar]

22. "despite Keith Moon"

is a prepositional phrase, whereas the Latin ab-ab* is a clause with a predicate/verb.

The ablative absolute doesn't exist in our language, since English lacks a discrete ablative case (and doesn't need one, thanks to present-passive/perfect-active participles). The "all things considered" example is an adverbial absolute, but not an ablative adverbial absolute.

To use your example of what a Latin ab-ab would look like if it were translated to English substituting a present participle:

Keith Moon being insufficiently terrible, The Who was (singularly) an excellent band.

* I'm tired of typing it.

[Gingersnap]

13. didn't study latin

most terms used in Latin are not used as linguistics terms generally anymore.

But hey, why did you ask when you already knew the answer?

Show off! ;)

[qwertyMike]

15. I wasn't showing off

I just wondered if I was the only person in the Universe who had even heard the term.

And no I didn't know until tonight what it really meant. Off the rugby field that is.

:)

[Dogmudgeon]

18. It's a small universe, after all

There's lots of linguistics geeks out here. I've studied Spanish, French, Catalan, Occitan (as a group, too), Russian, Esperanto, Latin, and Basque (see my post below on the ergative).

Not that I'm that good at any of them (well, my Esperanto is pretty good, but it's an easy language to learn, and I speak passable Spanish and can read French at a 3rd grade level).

But language study is a very common hobby, even in monoglot America. And I think that will be changing as Latino culture becomes increasingly accepted, vato.

--bkl

[qwertyMike]

19. It's so fascinating

Launguage study
Apart from the compulsory Latin I took at school.
I studied French German Spanish as well. And spoke them well too while abroad, Italian too. Except for German. I couldn't understand why I din't speak it well since English is kind of similar. The Romance langauges came easier.

I have a cousin in San Sebastian, Spain who is married to a Basque Nationalist. We talk in Spanish, but he throws in a few Basque dialect terms.

Fascinating.

Have you tried Hungarian??????????

[Dogmudgeon]

24. Basques, Hungarians, and Martians

Ah, your cousin married a Donostiako. (Donostia = San Sebastian, -ko genitive-local; origin)

I've known more Basques than Hungarians by far. I don't know how that came to be, since I'm not ethnically Basque, and I've lived in or near Philadelphia all my life (the Basques in America tended to settle in Nevada, Idaho, and California). I had a girlfriend who was an ethnic Basque, another friend who wrote one of the few Basque phrasebooks in English, and have known at least two other people who speak it. My brother is married to a Peruvian girl whose family traces part of its lineage back to Navarre, too, I think.

My interest in the language is pretty academic, and I'm not sure how long I'll keep up with it. It's an exotic language, it's highly agglutinative, so it's not too difficult to learn it, and it's more accessible than other exotic languages like Tibetan or Swahili. It also gives me a chance to work on my Spanish and French.

Also, Basque Country is becoming one of the big tech and cultural centers of Europe; politically, they are close to petitioning Spain, France, and the EU for independence; and this is all happening now, so it's interesting to keep up with it.

Many New Agers have a strange fascination with the Basques, thinking that they are from Atlantis or Mars or something. Actually, they're probably the remnant of the pre-Indo-European peoples who lived in Europe. There is also significant evidence that the "cavemen" who lived in that area 30,000 years ago really were the progenitors of the modern Basques. One flute found in a cave in Basque Country was dated at 30,000 years old, and was of unmistakable Basque design.

Hungarian is something else entirely. It's by far the most complicated langauge I've seen. I also kept company of a girl who knew some Hungarian, but she only learned it because her family was from Hungary originally, and she probably learned as little Magyar as I have learned Basque. I think Hungarian has been linked, linguistically to Korean. Korean!

As for German, don't sweat it. It really isn't much like English at all. And English is almost half French.

--bkl

[qwertyMike]

25. Hungarians

and Finns
Share linguistic similarities,
Unlike any other languages.

They also share long-leggy blonde women
<ahhhhhhhh>

Funny you mention the Basque "Donostiako"
he refers to himslef as Don Manuel ____________
And she as Donna Elisabetha __________

I thought they had a 'title' or something but Liz told me thay all call themselves 'Don' there.


He took me to an all-male cooking evening, which I guess they do there once a month. In a old castle with open pit fires.

What a feast!!!!!!!!

[Dogmudgeon]

26. Don y Donna

They're from Spanish honorifics; "Lord" and "Lady", respectively. I think they originally come from the Latin Dominus. It's possible that they're used instead of Señor(a). Donosti is an old Basque place-name, so the "Don" part is probably a false cognate.

Also, I was just reading about Finnish and the Finno-Ugric languages. There are actually quite a lot of them, mainly on the Finnish side, but they have very small numbers of speakers. The original F-U peoples probably fared a little better against the Indo-Europeans, if you look at the way their domains are split up. And isn't Estonian a F-U language, too? (They, too, produce many attractive young women.)

Are you familiar with the work of L. Cavalli-Sforza? His best work for the lay reader is The Great Human Diasporas. He has done a great deal of gene-marker work tracking the travels of our ancestors. Cavalli-Sforza works a lot of linguistic data into his book, and makes several "courageous" attempts to reconcile language diffusion and population movements over the past 5-15 thousand years.

--bkl

[DuctapeFatwa]

8. Its like an adverbial phrase

it is part of the sentence, but sort of apart from it, too.

here is a link that will explain it better than I can

http://www.dl.ket.org/latin3/grammar/ablativeabsolute.htm

[theemu]

10. Seven years of studying the Latin language

Hell yes Ablative Absolute means something to me.

[qwertyMike]

11. America

is a wonderful place, except for George Bush

[politicat]

12. yup, if you don't mind me saying so.... *grin*

nt.

[Davis_X_Machina]

14. I'm teaching it later this week....

...if that counts.

[qwertyMike]

16. Good God

You teach in a Seminary? Or what?

[Davis_X_Machina]

20. Nope...

...a very ordinary public high school. Been at it here for thirteen years, twenty years in the biz total.

[qwertyMike]

21. Latin

How wonderful in a public school

[Dogmudgeon]

17. Yo soy mas macho

porque yo se como usar la Ergativa.

I've been learning Basque in drips-and-drabs. (Along with more Spanish and French, which is kind of obligatory, since there's a shortage of Basque study material in English.) Euskara is an ergative language. The ergative case marks the object of a transitive verb, which is kind of backwards, relative to the accusative "bias" Indo-European languages have.

For the linguistics geeks, there's a thread on it from LinguistList at http://www.linguistlist.org/~ask-ling/archive-most-recent/msg05649.html

--bkl

[InkAddict]

23. A very slick Vodka ad

[birdman]

27. It's used in the Latin language

Had three years of it in Catholic School.