At 07:33 09/12/98 -0600, you wrote:
>Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>> I totally agree with Josh. Parts of speech are only accidental
and I think
>> a language with PoS can evolve into a language without PoS and the=
contrary
>> is true also. PoS are not mandatory, there is no "universal grammatical
>> feature" that forces people to make a distinction between nouns and=
verbs.
>> In fact, I know that at least one natlang, Nootka, that really has no=
parts
>> of speech. Nearly everything's possible in that natlang (I'll find an
>> example if you wish).
>
>I greatly disagree with that. Altho I don't know anything about Nootka,
>I find it *very* hard to believe that it makes *no* distinction between
>nouns and verbs - it must make some syntactic distinction, at least.
>
No syntactic distinction. There are "verbal" affixes, but they can be used
with every word in the sentence, depending on emphasis, without changing
the meaning of the sentence. I think there is a little semantic
distinction, but only between connectors and other words (and you can put
the affixes on the connectors!). But I'm not so sure about it. I'll try to
get more info.
Christophe Grandsire
|Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.
"R=E9sister ou servir"
homepage : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepage/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html