Re: Languages without adjectives

I think technically Talarian doesn't have (real) adjectives either.
At least not full-time adjectives with a pension scheme.  Nouns and
adjectives are all declined alike, so morphologically there is no
difference. Semantically, sactas (holy) contains within it the
adjectival meaning "holy" as well as the nominal function of "thing
for which the name is 'holy' ", what in English would be holiness.
Something like using an adjective as a noun (Blue is the colour of my
true loves eyes, to reuse a recent example.)

Padraic.

On Tue, 21 Mar 2000, Matt Pearson wrote:

>>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.
>