Re: Languages without adjectives

On Tue, 21 Mar 2000 16:46:41 +0100, Fredrik Ekman <ekman@...>
wrote:

>Some time ago I read an article about languages which mentioned in passing
>that some languages have no or few adjectives, using (if I understood the
>article correctly) nouns and verbs(?) for the same purposes.
>
>Has anyone ever used this in a constructed language? How does it work?
>
>If it has not been used in conlangs, can anyone point me in the direction
>of some natural languages with this feature?
Jarrda and Tirelat have no real adjectives, but instead use intransitive
verbs and participles. A noun may also modify another noun. For numbers,
Jarrda uses a system of classifiers like Chinese, which in Jarrda are
technically classified as nouns. Jarrda numbers and articles are the only
words in the language that are basically like adjectives. Tirelat uses
numbers without classifiers, which are essentially adjectives. But articles
in Tirelat have a particular syntactic function (marking the start of a
noun phrase) and don't really function as adjectives.

--
languages of Kolagia---> +---<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/languages.html>---
      Thryomanes        /"If all Printers were determin'd not to print any
   (Herman Miller)     / thing till they were sure it would offend no body,
   moc.oi @ rellimh <-/  there would be very little printed." -Ben Franklin