Re: Nouns, verbs, adjectives... and why they're pointless
| From: | Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, December 10, 1998, 7:21 |
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At 07:31 09/12/98 -0600, you wrote:
>Joshua Shinavier wrote:
>> I disagree completely. In Danoven there is no distinction,
>
>But Danoven is intended to be a "logical" language, thus it is invalid
>in discussions of problems with natural languages. In *natural*
>languages, verbs are easier to define precisely than nouns, with a few
>exceptions like _felis domesticus_.
>
>> I have yet to meet someone who could explain just what the distinction
between
>> nouns, verbs, and adjectives is supposed to represent;
>
>Nouns are objects, adjectives are properties, verbs are actions. It's
>as simple as that, at least as far as prototypes go.
>
>There are certain concepts that don't fit into any of these prototypes
>perfectly, these are the ones that may differ from language to language,
>being forced into one or another catagory. For example, English usually
>uses verbs for weather phenomena (e.g., "it's raining"), while other
>languages use nouns ("there is rain", "rain is falling"). I'm guessing
>that some use adjectives ("it is rainy"), but I don't know of any
>specific languages that do that. The existence of non-prototypical
>examples does not make the concepts themselves any less valid, or
>"artificial, sloppy, or unnecessary", any more than the fact that there
>is no such thing as a perfectly isolating, or perfectly agglutinating
>language invalidates those concepts. Just because a language can exist
>without these catagories, as you claim for Danoven (altho I'm skeptical
>that there's *no* distinction, including syntactic), doesn't mean that
>they're unnecessary, or even possible in reality (if people other than
>yourself were to speak Danoven as a first language, would those
>distinctions evolve? No one knows, but I'd guess that they probably
>would). Quite probably, the presence of these catagories in every human
>language known points to something fundamental in the human psyche,
>especially when it comes to distinguishing objects from actions.
>
Here again, I think you fell in the same trap I already told you about.
You know about a sample of languages, and you overgeneralize to the human
psyche. It's totally unjustified. And what about Mandarin, that makes no
syntactic distinction between nouns and verbs (only a semantic
distinction), and the so many languages that don't have adjectives (you say
'adjectives are properties', I'd rather say 'properties are rendered as
adjectives in some languages' as they are rendered as verbs, or nouns in
other languages (I think adjectives are more the exception in languages, as
far as I know), so the PoS adjective is unnecessary).
Christophe Grandsire
|Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.
"R=E9sister ou servir"
homepage : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepage/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html