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Re: Languages without adjectives

From:Sally Caves <scaves@...>
Date:Tuesday, March 21, 2000, 21:43
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. > > Has anyone ever used this in a constructed language? How does it work?
This has been discussed before quite a lot... such languages usually turn their adjectives into verbs. "The moon whites," etc. Lots of stative verbs. The fox that quicks and reds jumped over the dog that lazies and browns. Or: The quicking redding fox jumps over the lazying browning dog. ;-)
> If it has not been used in conlangs, can anyone point me in the direction > of some natural languages with this feature?
A number of conlangs do this kind of thing. I think, IIRC, I responded to Luca Mangiat, who was experimenting with something along these lines. Was it Luca? Sally -- ============================================================ SALLY CAVES scaves@frontiernet.net http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves (bragpage) http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teonaht.html (T. homepage) http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/contents.html (all else) ===================================================================== Niffodyr tweluenrem lis teuim an. "The gods have retractible claws." from _The Gospel of Bastet_ ============================================================