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Re: Nouns, verbs, adjectives... and why they're pointless

From:Joshua Shinavier <jshinavi@...>
Date:Wednesday, December 9, 1998, 13:50
> 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.
That unwillingness to believe in a language with homogenous semantic words is the central problem; if a person grows up using PoS as word classes then these classes soon become firmly imbedded in their brain matter and it may take a bit of practice to be able to work with a language which lacks them. I don't know anything about Nootka, either, and I'm not sure what to think of a language *evolving* without PoS -- I don't know of anyone who's learned to walk before they crawled, either, but that doesn't necc. mean it's not possible -- but I know that at least one mature conlang gets along quite well without them... and I expect that this has more to do with the desirability of that feature than the specific language; Dan/Aroven is a human tongue for primarily human purposes like any other (only, *a better one*; sorry, I couldn't help it :) JJS