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Re: A Language built around a novel grammar

From:Christopher Bates <chris.maths_student@...>
Date:Thursday, November 16, 2006, 12:37
> 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.
It is important to understand that these two are equivalent. Having verbs cover typically nominal territory and nouns cover typically verbal territory are actually the same thing, namely a unified verb/noun class, it's just being described in different ways. As for the question asked, the idea of having one class covering both typical verbal and nominal concepts is an extremely common conlanging idea.

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Herman Miller <hmiller@...>