Re: A Language built around a novel grammar

Weld Carter, Jr. wrote:
> I joined this list a few weeks ago, and have ‘lurked’, watching to see
> if a thread already exists here that comes close to addressing my
> concern. Since I haven’t found one, let me attempt here to start one
> myself.
>
> Has anyone here done or seen work on a language relying on a grammar
> that does not require the noun/verb distinction? Though this may sound
> preposterous, I know of at least a few Native-American tongues that
> function that way. One member of such a speech community got reported to
> my colleague, Andy as saying, “I can speak all day without using a
> single noun.”
Lojban doesn't distinguish nouns and verbs in its basic vocabulary,
although it does have pronouns and proper names. As I understand it, in
Lojban the equivalent of a word like the English word "cat" would be a
word ("mlatu" in this case) that represents a relationship between an
individual cat and a particular category (breed of cat) that the
individual belongs to.

There have also been attempts to do without verbs, but I'd think that
nouns would be the easier part of speech to leave out. Pronouns could be
a part of the verbal morphology.

> Western Indo-European languages eliminate the observer (speaker) from
> consideration so completely that we native speakers of those languages
> don’t notice the absence, and can scarcely imagine the possibility of
> doing things in any other way. Our sentences allegedly express “what
> really happened”; our verb-forms use some infixes, but mainly suffixes,
> to line up these “happenings” in terms of “time” (separated from
> “space”). As I understand the matter, many Native American languages
> modify their “action-words” (I decline to call them verbs) in terms of
> the degree of validity with which the speaker speaks.
Lojban also has a set of evidential morphemes, although these are
separate words in Lojban rather than affixes attached to a verb.

My language Tirelat combines these two; it's impossible to express the
time of an action without at the same time commenting on the validity of
the assertion. Tense and evidential markers are fused into a single
morpheme. (Compare with a language like Spanish, for instance, which
fuses tense and person into a single verb ending.)

Reply