And the “instrumental” is indeed an instrumental when it occurs alone — except where it doesn’t: “be” and “become” also require it most of the time, which must be the function of an equative, right? –, but it can also occur together with a large number of prepositions, such as “with”, meaning it has about half the functions of the Latin “ablative”.

And… when a Latin “ablative” occurs alone, in the majority of cases it doesn’t mean “away from” but has instrumental function. In contrast, the preposition a(b) “away from” governs the “ablative”. Hmpf.

Also, the “middle voice” or “mediopassive”. Why isn’t it simply called “reflexive”? Were the terms invented by native speakers of English who weren’t used to reflexive pronouns, or what?

When I first started writing papers, I stuck to the ‘traditional’ terminology I had encountered, but got a lot of negative reaction to it. I think that unlike certain North American language families, most Amazonian families don’t have large academic constituencies, and so there is not as much support for non-standard terminology. So I have since been incrementally updating the terminology, which has also had the side benefit of having to think more seriously about certain aspects of the corresponding linguistic description. Personally I don’t see much of down-side, as I have found that even the creators of the legacy terminology see the pros of standardization.

I wanted to comment, btw, on the use of defining LaTeX variables for morpheme gloss codes. I have been doing it for about a year now, and have found it to be very useful — especially when half way through the grammar one decides that a given morpheme should really be called something else!

I rarely see “semi-transitive” in Eskimo-Aleut work, but it pops up sometimes. Half-transitive is fairly common in E-A work, though. Usually the authors don’t explain what they mean by it, but it tends to be used to describe either antipassives (another source of contention) where intransitive verbs have indefinite objects or intransitive verbs that are semantically transitive. They’re applying it as a syntactic term, however.