Re: Languages without adjectives

>Fredrik 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.
And Kristian Jensen replied:

>One interesting way of having descriptive modifiers which I have
>found is by deriving nouns from verbal roots with adjective-like
>meanings (e.g. 'be big') and using these derived nouns to form
>compounds.
This is what Tokana does.  From the verb "kaila" = "be hot" you
can derive the noun "kaili" = "a hot thing", which can then be
juxtaposed with another noun to form a compound:  "mas kaili"
= "hot soup" (lit. "hot-thing soup", or more pedantically, "soup
which belongs to the class of hot things").  I'd never thought
of incorporating a classifier system into the derivational
process, as in your Papuan example, but I like that very much!
Maybe the next conlang...

Most adjectival concepts are expressed by verbs in Tokana,
but a few are expressed by (underived) nouns.  This is true of
colours, for example:  Where English says "the house is white",
Tokana says "the house has whiteness".

Matt.