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

From:Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
Date:Wednesday, December 9, 1998, 13:31
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. -- "We're not obsessed, we're focused!" - X-Philes' motto, by Gizzie http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files ICQ: 18656696 AOL: NikTailor