Re: genitive

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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