Re: Languages without adjectives

In message <Pine.GSO.4.00.10003211643220.29741-100000@sara.lysator.liu.s
e>, Fredrik Ekman <ekman@...> writes

>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?
Elet Anta is another conlang which does this.  There aren't any
adjectives, but both verbs and nouns have an atttributive form (enuye
shorisu).  Eg, for verbs:

   Brath rakt:  The horse is fast
   horse be-fast
vs.
   Raktye      brath:  The fast horse
   be-fast-ATR horse

This is just the same as

   Brath shast:    The horse is drinking
   Shastye brath:  The drinking horse

Similarly for nouns (same morphology, too):

   Combadye colot:  Town house
   town-ATR house

Actually, this is ambiguous in Elet Anta: it could mean "house of the
town" or "the kind of house you get in a town, town-ish house" - it's
surprising how often this doesn't matter.  If you have to disambiguate
it, you can form two verbs:

   combado:    to be town-ish
   combaduva:  to belong to the town, be of the town

And then its:

   Combadoye       colot:     The town-ish house
   be-town-ish-ATR house
   Combaduvay         colot:  The house of the town
   belong-to-town-ATR house

Actually EA doesn't have prepositions either as such, but postpositioned
verbs (afgatolon), and these can be attributive too.  For example, with
"ursa" - be under:

   Gorof    baldursa:  the dog is under the table
   dog      table-be-under
vs.
   Baldursay          gorof:  the dog under the table
   table-be-under-ATR dog

In fact EA doesn't have adverbs either, but uses another form, the
adverbial (entye shorisu) both of verbs and nouns for that:

   Brath raktwa shast:     The horse is drinking quickly
   En combadwa falon:      He/she speaks in a town-ish way
   Gorof baldursaw shast:  The dog is drinking under the table

Raktye      murudy'      uc-cufar tamansendien og-gorofarthew
be-fast-ATR be-brown-ATR the-fox  be-lazy-ATR  the-dog-go-across-ADV
la   aract
PERF jump

--John

--
John Fisher   john@drummond.demon.co.uk   johnf@epcc.ed.ac.uk
Elet Anta website: http://www.drummond.demon.co.uk/anta/
Drummond ro cleshfan merec; fanye litoc, inye litoc