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

> 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