Re: How many verbs?

David Peterson wrote at 2004-07-12 16:17:27 (EDT)
 >
 > There's a language in Australia with three verbs: "to do",
 > "to be" and "to go".
 >
 > Most verbal ideas are achieved with nouns, rather than
 > adverbs.   So "to hunt", is "to do a hunt", where "a hunt" is
 > the direct object.   Then of course there's probably "I am
 > happy" or "I am a teacher", and "to go" is self-explanatory.
 >
 > Could it be done *without* "to be", though, per the recent
 > thread?   Possibly.   That might be interesting to see.   Though,
 > quite frankly, you could do without "to go", couldn't you?
 > You'd just do a going, or something like that.   :)
 >
 > Emily: Do you know the language I'm thinking of?   I only
 > ask because you seem to have an encyclopedic knowledge
 > of everything.   Or maybe one of the Aussies on the list knows...?
 > I know it's from Australia, and I'm fairly certain it's not English.
 > Or Dyirbal.
 >

I thought at first that it might be Jaminjung, about which I
remembered reading something a while back*, but this turns out to have
rather more than 3 verbs (though fewer than 35).  An internet search
suggests that the language in question is probably Jingulu**.

See here, for a discription:
http://eprint.uq.edu.au/archive/00000449/01/rpverbs.pdf

It seems that the three "verbs" are "to go", "to come", and "to do/to
be".  It's also not quite as clear-cut a situation as you make it
sound above:

 | Different analyses of the structure of Jingulu verb words has been
 | proposed.  Chadwick (1975), following largely semantic criteria,
 | calls the initial root the _verb stem_, unless there is no root (as
 | in (2-3) above), in which case the final TAMM morpheme is the
 | stem. Pensalfini (1997, In press a, b), on the other hand,
 | appealing to the distribution of the elements along with
 | phonological phenomena such as vowel harmony (see Pensalfini 2002),
 | considers the final TAMM morpheme to be a _light verb_ and the true
 | verbal head of the word, with the initial co-verbal root, when it
 | appears, being a category-less but semantically rich element which
 | does not directly contribute to the syntax of the clause.
 |
 | This article is concerned with the final obligatory element of the
 | Jingulu verb, and follows the latter of the above approaches in
 | calling these morphemes _light verbs_.

* Well, okay, what I thought was more along the lines of "maybe it's
  that language, where did I read that, wasn't it in the examples in
  the Leipzig rules for interlinears?".

** Based on this page:
   http://www.thoughtplay.com/newlog/oldlog/archive-102003.htm