Re: Telona grammar, part 1

Kala Tunu wrote:
>reading attentively Jonathan's long Telona grammar. AllNoun, AllVerb and
>NoVerbNoNoun conlanging is a genre of its own ;-) the last time the list
>simmered about it the mess was fun! :-) i had a try for a few months, then
>eventually read a book explaining entity, behaviour, predicate and
>argument--it
>was about time--and never got back there. to me AllNoun isn't all noun,
>it's
>AllNoTag! :-)
>
>btw, i recently read an old article written in 1998 by a neurologue whose
>name
>is Damasio reporting tomographic surveys showing that entities and
>behaviours
>are not even processed in the same brain areas. a same word like "man" may
>refer
>to one or more entities (human being, male person) as well as to one or
>more
>behaviours (to man a ship, to be manly) but all these concepts are clearly
>a
>priori either entities or behaviours stocked or processed in two different
>parts
>of the brain albeit under the same word "man". the fact that you don't tag
>words
>as entities ("nouns") or behaviours ("verbs") cannot change the fact that
>they
>make different areas of your brain glow on tomographic images. btw verbs,
>pronouns, conjunctions and syntax are apparently processed in a same area.
>this
>article examplified all this with very impressive witnesses of aphasic
>people
>who could not use verbs anymore or nouns or only certain categories of
>nouns
>like instruments, body parts, etc. then i guess that an entity may be
>turned
>into a predicate (with my favourite "copulae") and a behaviour may be
>turned
>into an argument (with a "nominalizer" or you name it)--however copulae and
>nominalizers are zero tag as in "to dream" vs. "a dream".
We-ell, this'd seem to confirm my old suspicion that the difference between
"objects" and "actions", or to speak linguistian, "nouns" and "verbs", is
hardwired into the human brain.

>could you imagine the conlang invented by some aphasic conlanger?
>AllNounists
>may pick good ideas there.
I guess that a truly "AllNoun" (or rather "NoNounVsVerbDistinction")
language would have to be spoken by aliens with a decidedly non-human mental
make-up. A conlang by an aphatic would, by defintion, not be a functioning
human language.

>or did they? or am i offtopic again? why can't i
>refrain from writing loooooooooong posts? that's why i try not posting at
>all
>anymore.
You call this a long post? We-ell, while a main point of the Theory of
Relativity is that some things aren't relative*, post length is!

* Einstein actually considered calling it "Invariance Theory" instead. Had
he done so, the popular science of today, I figure, would look a bit
different, not to mention the SF genre! "Remember, cap'n, everything is
invariant!"

                                                     Andreas

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