Re: THEORY nouns and cases (was: Verbs derived from noun cases)

On 27 Apr 2004 Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...> wrote:

> I think the English say something like "the proof of the pudding
> is when you eat it". [...] That's what I suppose that a matchbox
> doesn't belong to the same conceptual category as "red" or "to
> burn"
  Let's eat the pudding in Hungarian. It has a category called
"nomenverba". If we take the Hungarian equivalent of "to burn",
it's a nomenverbum: _e'g_. Use can use it both as a noun and both
as verb. They share the same conceptual category in the language,
just like a mathematical function. A function could have various
actual output values depending on its input value(s), e.g. a single
function like square root can result in an integer, a real number
or a complex number. Logically, you have no different square root
functions for the various output types. You may have a single
concept "burn" -- a language function -- that has various
parameters (i.e. input values). One of the possible parameters is
the actual position in the sentence: is it a core of a noun phrase,
a verbal phrase, etc.?

  (My personal opinion is that logical language is a nonsense. It's
true even for programming languages: when you implement the square
root functions, you have to write several separate algorithms for
the various input. This is not logical in mathematical sense. It's
a compromise between the etheric logic and the implementation
tools. And every compromise is driven by subjective decisions.
I think this is true also for the conlangs.)

> A fox may bite me, but I'm pretty sure no "brown" ever will bite me,
> because there is no such thing as a brown, except in language games
> maybe.
  You left out the dimension of the time. Germanic proto-language
made a language game, and replaced the *r.k'tos for *beró (or
*bernuz in Scandinavia), i.e. 'brown'; and every Anglophone plays
this game until now when he/she utters the word "bear". A very
similar thing happened in Greek: "phruné" 'toad' was also meant
'brown'. In Hungarian the origin of the word for "fox" and the
adjective "sly, cunning" is the same, but in contrast to the
previous examples, the concept of the physical entity expanded to
cover the attributive semantic instance.

  These are natural and common examples. Can be a natural and
common phenomenon illogical? The tangent function has no output
value at (pi/2)+k*pi input values. Can be this behaviour an
argument against the logicity of the tangent function? The answer
is, I suppose, no. Similarly the English implementation of the
"brown" concept just has no biting output value (now and here!)
when it's appled as a noun. But -- according to my dictionary --
you may put its output value in your pocket: in slang, it denotes a
copper coin like halfpenny.

Reply