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Re: New Ideas... group project?

From:Mathias M. Lassailly <lassailly@...>
Date:Tuesday, October 6, 1998, 21:37
I've been thinking in some new ideas about a new language with no part of
> speech disctintion for words themselves but a functional inflection. > > The idea is not having a verb-noun disctintion, any word would function as > either subject, object, predicate, location or modifier. The disctiontion > in a phrase would be held by an inflection, like a case afix, and other > modifiers, like tense, number or evidence would be given as afixes. A word > acting as object could have a tense mark, as a word acting as predicate > could have a number mark. > > Any sugestions to this? I wouldn't like it to be too aglutinative... I've > think in biliteral or triliteral roots. > > Idea is to make it speakable for human beings, and roots should be > selfsegregating from modifiers. > > _____ > Carlos Eugenio Thompson Pinzsn > http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/9028/ > >
The famous monosyllabic Guaspi language works like that. Also some 'Mizarian' language of Herman Miller I think, but I may be wrong. I also made once a monosyllabic language like that but without affixes : only plain words becoming modifyiers with a specific tone. me! past? go^ town it! big^ : I went to the big town. Actually Khmer doesn't have any syntactic tag (the only one I know is 'bpi' = 'of') and works quite well only with plain words without distinction between noun, verb, adverb or adjective : nouns and verbs may be either action nouns, adverbs, modifyers, adjectives, etc, like in Chinese of course but I don't know Chinese syntax well so I'd rather let others speak re. that topic. You just need to make very short sentences - many of them - to get it right because it's hard to tell phrase from compound noun, let alone connection (connection is regarded as a 'learned' construction) : man take fish till harbour = 'a man fishes and goes to harbour' or 'a (professional) fisherman goes to harbour' or else 'a man takes a fish which goes to harbour'. Context helps...sometime ! Words with tense tag : I have examples of some American native languages that tag tense or aspect on nouns, referring to the time of their own existence, to the time of the action discussed, or to the time of the speach. ----- See the original message at http://www.egroups.com/list/conlang/?start=16857 -- Free e-mail group hosting at http://www.eGroups.com/