Re: Telona grammar, part 1

In a message dated 2/3/02 11:56:14 PM, steven@olywa.net writes:

>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.
Eloshtan does just that:
kutso-c 'there's a dog/it's a dog/a dog exists'
upufo-c 'there's a dancer/it's a dancer/a dancer exists/'
There's no distinction here between identifying a specific person as a dancer
versus saying that one exists, but this is only because if one wants to say
the latter, it just has to get identified with a specific person -1st, 2nd,
3rd, 4th, 5th, or 6th. Kind of like in logic "there is an X such that X is a
dancer" - and if you're talking about someone specific, they would have
already been identified as X (or say, 3rd person), or can be identified with
X afterwards.
So any noun can be a verb meaning that the noun exists, or something is that
noun, or does what the noun typically does. Any verb can be a noun meaning
the doer or the verb, whether that verb is an action ("jump") or a state ("be
green"). Adjectives are pretty much the same thing - they could be understood
as "which does _" or "which is _"

Words are divided up into nouns, verbs, adj.s, and postpositions. But the
first three can always be made into each other, and all postpositions can be
verbs (though not vice versa). There are also two particles ... one is almost
a pp, but for where it occurs in relation to relative clauses, and the other
functions as either a verb or simply an extension of a noun. Anyway, it's
sort of like what you've all been talking about - words are largely
interchangeable for different parts of speech - but there are distinct parts
of speech, differing in both the suffixes they can take and where they can
occur in a sentence.

egle lec covaloctoc epe ce noptol vif (enough rambling for one night)
Josh Roth
http://members.aol.com/fuscian/eloshtan.html