Re: Tlvn, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Nik Taylor wrote:

> "R. Nierse" wrote:
> > I see in the examples that
> > Lillooet does not need morphology or some other instrument to change verbs
> > into nouns and v.v.. That makes me think that Lillooet does not really
> > distinguish nouns from verbs.
>
> If so, then English does not either.  There's no consistent morphology
> to change nouns into verbs, or vice versa.
Well, it's not the morphology per se that distinguishes nouns from verbs.
One only posits the existence of a lexical category if it makes sense for
a certain language's syntax.  In Atkan Aleut, there is, for example, no such thing
as an adjective:  you simply have lots and lots of verbs meaning "be good",
"be red", etc. Any posited category for "adjectives" would have to be
identical in every way to that of "verbs", so why posit it? Occam's Razor,
people! There is no morphosyntactic reason to impose a distinction
on a language just because it happens to exist in English, or Latin, or
whatever.

(Sorry.  Just venting frustration.)

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
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