Re: Verbs derived from noun cases
| From: | Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, April 24, 2004, 6:57 |
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On Thursday, April 22, 2004, at 02:51 PM, Henrik Theiling wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> writes:
>> ...
>> The answer is either indefinite, for reasons Henrik explained, or zero.
>> Tom Breton managed to banish verbs from his AllNoun without any recourse
>> to noun cases.
>
> I'd consider one case the same as zero cases. :-)
IMO it doesn't make sense to talk of nouns & pronouns having one case.
That'd mean all the world's languages decline their nouns & pronouns which
seems to me counter-intuitive.
I think it only becomes meaningful to speak of noun/pronoun cases when
there are at least two contrasting forms as, e.g. in Old French & Old
Provençal (nominative ~ oblique).
> And if you only have one class of things, I'd consider it arbitrary
> whether to call them nouns or verbs.
On the basis of that argument, one might say they could be called
adjectives, adverbs or whatever term comes arbitrarily to mind. I guess
they are, in fact, then just 'words'.
> Depends on what semantical
> concepts you start with.
Exactly!! Let me quote what Tom Breton actually wrote:
"AllNoun has only one part of speech, which is largely but not entirely
analogous to nouns in other languages. Thus the name AllNoun."
It seems to me fairly obvious that Tom was starting with semantic concepts
broadly analogous to nouns.
> But then, the distinction would be more like
> state, event or even physical object. The naming 'noun' vs. 'verb' is
> too syntactical, so I would consider 'AllNouns' is a misnomer.
That you'd have to take up with Tom; he named the language. But then many
languages, including some natlangs (e.g. "Hittite"), have names that are
strictly misnomers - but we habitually use them.
Ray
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