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

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.

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