Re: Look, Ma... verbs or no verbs?

-----Original Message-----
From: Edward Heil <edwardheil@...>
To: Multiple recipients of list CONLANG <CONLANG@...>
Date: Wednesday, April 14, 1999 2:00 PM
Subject: Look, Ma... verbs or no verbs?


<snip>
I claim that all of your adjectives are actually finite verbs!  It's not
john
thrower ball object-thrown, it's john is-throwing ball is-being-thrown.
Each
sentence of your verbless language is actually a coordination of a bunch of
two-word microsentences, each with a subject and a verb.  It's not verbless,
it's 50% verbs!

How can we decide who's right, you (saying they are adjectives) or me
(saying
they are verbs)?  This illustrates the dirty secret of linguistics:
virtually
nobody has a good definition of these terms.

Ed

HAHAHA

That's exactly the problem I discovered when I took a closer look.  I could
hand someone a sentence like my earlier "Chuka John uda petru gegeno
ketusu.", and it translation, "John threw a rock at the fence" and they
would naturally conclude that "chuka" was a verb.  And I realized, to my
horror, that there is _no way_ I could prove them wrong!  If it looks like a
verb, and walks like a verb, and quacks like a verb ... YIKES! it's a verb!

So I came up with the idea that maybe I could use the same approach to word
order, i.e., each of the three participants (John, fence, rock) would have
their own "quasi-verb-like" word describing their role.  However, one of
those words might have a different ending to indicate that that was the
"principle" action.  "John gave-Princ; Mary took; book exchanged" for "John
gave Mary the book." and "John gave; Mary took-Princ; book exchanged" for
"Mary took the book from John." and "John gave; Mary took; book
exchanged-Princ." If the book flew from John to Mary of it's own volition.

Somewhere in there is the germ of a good idea.  I just haven't teased it out
yet.

--gary.