Charles wrote :
>Mathias M. Lassailly wrote:
>
> > This is my ONLY message regarding cases :
> >
> > 4.1. Nouns as sole verb roots : what does this imply ?
>
> That section alone was worth the price of admission
> to this list. You *must* either post further references
> or elucidate further the 10 nominal-ergative (?) cases.
Thanks for your appreciation. However what I describe here is not linguisticly valid,
it's just a technical trick to execute what natlangs avoid for some good
reason, I guess :-)
Pablo tells us that it's too heavy. I agree.
If you want a hint of what such system looks like, I've derided it in
http://members.aol.com/lassailly/shan.html
there are only seven cases, but it's strange enough with that little.
Don't take it seriously. You'll never see that in a natlang.
FURTHER
Pablo prefers noun and verb roots.
Carlos prefers only noun roots but accepts verb roots.
May I suggest that we could first try to find a noun root for a concept, then pick
a verb root if we can't find one.
I think it's good to have both tools to make a predicate from a noun and a noun
from a predicate. Having both types of roots forces us to procure both tools.
Difference between 'noun' and 'verb' is very thin in state nouns for example.
So Pablo's proposal sounds wise to me (although I would instinctively prefer only
noun roots like Carlos).
>
> > 5. Vocabulary :
> >
> > Yes. That's a good idea. Who volunteers ? [:-{
> >
> > Why not Charles ? He's stuck his finger in the hinge, now he must pay to get free :-)
>
> I was only asking, not telling!
No way ! You can't escape !
snip
>
> Columns are: count, word, category, files.
> This shows that the most frequent words are
> grammatical particles and pronouns etc.
> See also "Zipf's Law". Further down are
> the nouns, adjectives, and verbs:
>
snip
> What I'd like would be a sort of ontological
> tree as in WordNet, grouping the near-infinite
> nouns into a tree of sub-categories, a taxonomy.
> The higher-level words would be the essentials
> of a "reasonable" vocabulary. Maybe just 2000
> or so well-chosen words is enough? Anyway,
> it would be a good list to re-lex from.
>
Go on.
What do the other think about that ?
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