Re: Nouns, verbs, adjectives... and why they're pointless
From: | Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...> |
Date: | Wednesday, December 9, 1998, 13:33 |
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.
--
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