Re: genitive
From: | Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...> |
Date: | Wednesday, May 1, 2002, 21:34 |
David Peterson wrote:
>Ebera wrote:
>
><<Adjective *is* a noun case. The noun marked at the adjective provides an
>additional information on the quality or the state of its referent. Just
>like the locative provides an information on where its referent is.>>
>
> [Satire beginning] What? How could you possibly think this? There
>are
>no such things as nouns. Maybe you got this idea from *your* language and
>the others you've studied, but that's not the way it really is, oh no. You
>see, in the *real* world, nouns don't exist; only verbs do. There are
>verbs
>meaning "to be a mother", "to be a rock", "to be a stapler", etc.
>Adjectives
>are just just a part of these verbs, so you'll have one verb which means
>"to
>be a stapler" and another which means "to be a red stapler". I really
>don't
>see how you could possibly have missed this. [Satire end]
>
> Point being, any type of classification which puts one idea over
>another
>and identifies one method of classification as clearly superior and
>necessarily more realistic than another type of classification isn't valid,
>because true abstraction is impossible. The classification you came up
>with
>seems more reactionary, in that because European language classify
>description in one way, then, logically, the other way of classifying
>description must be the "correct", "real" way. Such an argument is
>illogical.
>
Still, it appears that the noun~verb distinction is hard-wired into the
human brain, which rather suggests that classifications that include this
distinction may be better for describing human language than ones that
don't.
Andreas
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