Re: Noun tense was Re: bac . . . some info

le lun 22-07-2002 à 08:46, Ray Brown a écrit :

> >> I'm sure there is a natlang with noun tense in Campbell, but I can't
> >> find it, and I'm beginning to suspect that I dreamt it.  Does anyone
> >> know any examples of natlangs that mark tense on a noun?

> I'm fairly sure they do exist, but I haven't been able to track one down
> yet.
> At the back of my mind is some idea that Innuit does this.  Can anyone
> either
> confirm this or tell me that my mind is playing tricks?

Well... french, english !?!? In french we have |ex-femme| ("ex-wife" ?),
|ex-président| ("ex-president" ?), and I guess there is a strong PAST
value in |ex|, although I guess there is a PERFECTIVE value too ("who
used to be X but who isn't anymore", very roughly).In french, you can
say |futur président|  (with a FUTURE value), and this is hard to decide
if it is a complex word of an Adjective+Noun structure, although
orthograph suggest the latter.

But I'm pretty sure that what you meant was something more systematic.
Nahatl is a good example of such a feature. For instance, |tlâ-namaka-k|
"things-sell-PERFECT" means either "the seller" or "he has sold". |Ka
tlahtoâya in siwâtl| means "the woman talked" (or 'she talked, the one
who is a woman' = 'TOPIC things-tell-PERFECT DETERMINANT woman') whereas
|ka siwâtl in tlahtoâya|    means "the one who talked is a woman" ('she
is a woman, the one who talked' = 'TOPIC woman DETERMINANT
things-tell-PERFECT'). So when peceeded by |in| a word gets a "noun
value", in a european-minded way.

Eskimo has this too, as the "man drinks" is 'the drinking of the man'.
Unfortunately I don't have any sentence sample of eskimo.
But it seems that, whenever (natural) languages have this feature (as a
true one, not like french above), there is no nead boundary between noun
and verbs (at least for those two langs). I hope someone could tell us
more about it :).

Julien.

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