Re: Telona grammar, part 1

Let's leave aside the question of whether the nouns "interior" and "cause"
refer to classes of entities in the same way that, say, "dog" and "apple"
do.

The noun "interior" can't substitute for the preposition "in," because the
noun doesn't specify the relationship that the referent of another noun has
to said interior.   e.g.

MAN     INTERIOR     ROOM

There is no linguistic context here that would prevent this utterance from
reading in any of these ways (or others).

The man is in the interior of the room.
The man is outside the interior of the room.
The man's interior is near the room.
The man's interior is like a room.
& so on.

The point is, reference to an interior is not the same as specifying an
entity's relationship to some interior space.

True, nothing prevents one word from meaning both "interior" and "in."   But
said word is not univocal, and the different readings are homonyms in two
distinct respective word classes.

True, nothing prevents the noun "interior" from obviating the preposition
"in" in a language that has other words that stand for relationships.   For
instance, "The man is located at the interior of the room," can mean "The
man is in the room."   But even in this example, you still need words that
specify relationships rather than refer to entities, namely "be located at "
and "of."

So too with "cause."

LIGHTNING        CAUSE        MALFUNCTION

Absent any markers that specify the relationships among these referential
words, does the latter utterance mean that the lightning was the cause of
the malfunction, or that the malfunction was the cause of the lightning?

For a speaker or writer reporting the event to listeners remote in space and
time, there is no non-linguistic context that will answer the question.
Without markers that stand for relationships rather than entities, "of," for
example, there's no linguistic context to answer the question either.

If we use SVO or OVS word order to answer this question, then we've
abandoned the notion of eliminating word classes.

Although I think that eliminating word classes probably eliminates syntax, I
still think that it might be possible to develop a language with only one
class of words, provided that the members of this class could all take the
same set of relationship marking suffixes.

The big obstacle would be figuring out how to mark normally nominal &
normally verbal roots in the same way.   Nominals and verbals could take the
same endings in existential utterances:

DOG-E            There's a dog.
DANCE-E       There's dancing;   someone's dancing.

Could this be a starting point?

Jim G.






original exchange:

> Jim Grossmann wrote:
> > Conversely, how can univocal words meaning "in," "because of," or "and"
> > refer to entities?
>
> "Interior", "Cause", not sure for "and", perhaps "group"?