Bynon (1980: 160) states: “Given the loss of ergative agreement marking in the verb, the clitic must, it would seem, now definitely be analyzed as a marker of agreement with the agent-subject despite its anomalous position in the sentence”, and concludes that “in spite of its various no longer functional traces of ergativity, Suleimaniye must be considered to have ceased to be ergative.” However, ergativity is still claimed for Sorani Kurdish.2 Recently Haig rejected Bynon analysis and stated (2008: 302) “The O is only occasionally overtly cross-referenced […]. However, when it is crossreferenced, then exclusively on the verb, and using the same set of suffixes that cross-reference an S.”* In this article I argue in favour of Bynon (1979, 1980) and show that there is no agreement of the object and the verb. The personal endings used in the past tense of transitive verbs take over the various functions of enclitic pronouns. On the other hand, enclitic pronouns used in the past tense of transitive verbs are, in fact, subject agreement markers, personal endings, so to speak. After a short introduction to ergativity and relevant terminology (Section 1), I will give a brief survey of the historical development of the ergative construction in Iranian (Sections 2 and 3). A comparison of Middle Persian and Sorani Kurdish (Section 4) is made to understand the differences between the past tense constructions of these two languages which look so similar at first glance. In Section 5, I propose an explanation of the development in Sorani Kurdish and then discuss the function of personal markers, which are in my view not as complicated as Haig (2008: 295) puts it (Section 6).