inanimates

Furthermore, the researchers noted that while children generally are taught in school that only plants and animals are alive, the traditional Menominee notion of "alive" includes natural inanimates, such as rocks and water, and may even include artifacts, depending on the purpose for which they were made.

Marc Bekoff: Animals, Kids, and Slaughterhouse Effects on Crime 2010

Furthermore, the researchers noted that while children generally are taught in school that only plants and animals are alive, the traditional Menominee notion of "alive" includes natural inanimates, such as rocks and water, and may even include artifacts, depending on the purpose for which they were made.

Marc Bekoff: Animals, Kids, and Slaughterhouse Effects on Crime 2010

Witness page 56 of Archaic Syntax in Indo-European - The spread of transitivity 2000 where the theory is artfully destroyed in a pair of brief sentences:Yet cross-linguistic analysis has pointed out that ergative marking affects first of all inanimates, and only later animates.

Archive 2009-10-01 2009

Some animates use l-genitives; some inanimates use s-genitives.

Contradictions with authors' accounts of Etruscan word Rasna 2009

So, given only an inanimate noun followed by a transitive verb, we know that the noun cannot be the agent of a transitive action nb. inanimates inherently can't act for themselves!

Disproving a particular translation of TLE 193 once and for all 2009

Witness page 56 of Archaic Syntax in Indo-European - The spread of transitivity 2000 where the theory is artfully destroyed in a pair of brief sentences:Yet cross-linguistic analysis has pointed out that ergative marking affects first of all inanimates, and only later animates.

Nipping the PIE ergative *-s theory right in the bud 2009

The important difference between animates and inanimates afterall is the inflection of the nominative singular.

Oops, I forgot about Thematicization 2008

My thinking is that, due to phonotactic peculiarities, animates should have had more opportunities to develop thematic stems than inanimates did.

Oops, I forgot about Thematicization 2008

I recognize that the majority of zombies are simply hard-working, decent, family oriented ambulatory inanimates who are simply trying to get on with lifelessness.

Idle Hands Don Lewis 2008

I've traced this odd quirk to the genitive endings *-ós and *-óm, the latter of which probably had originally been used for a seperate case altogether (perhaps once meaning “amongst” or “amidst”) which later acquired a collective nuance (hence its use in inanimates) and then finally a plural sense (hence the ending being used in animate genitive plurals).

Genitival Misanalysis 2008