What is an ergative language? What is the ergative case? What is the absolutive case? What is ergativity?
First and foremost a warning: this is a very deep topic and an FAQ answer will not be able to provide a full picture.
To understand ergativity, you first must understand syntactic roles, and for that in turn you must know what transitive and intransitive verbs are. Luckily, this isn’t very difficult. Consider the