Re: Tlvn, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

"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.  Sure, there are suffixes
like -ize and -tion, but it's also quite easy to change parts of speach
around, as in "I watered the garden", where "water" is turned into a
verb.  I notice that in your example there are verbal inflections on the
word for "coyote", indicating that it's a verb.

I tend to go with a prototype theory, that is, verbs are words that are
treated like prototypical verbs.  A prototypical verb is an action with
both a causer and an affected being (i.e., transitive verbs), other
kinds of verbs are extensions of this, which explains why no languages
use constructions like "I am the hitter of him", but some do use
constructions like "To me is the car" for "I have the car" (because
"hit" is a prototypical verb, while "have" isn't)

Prototypical nouns, on the other hand, are physical objects, while other
nouns are an extension of that concept.

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