Re: A Language built around a novel grammar

Christopher Bates wrote:
>> 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.
Well, put another way, there are different ways of eliminating the
noun/verb distinction. I guess you could say they're "equivalent" in a
trivial sense: the end result is having a single part of speech that
fills in for both nouns and verbs, but other aspects of the grammar may
be quite different. If the noun/verb words are more "noun-like" in their
syntax and morphology, and the traditional functions of a verb have to
be taken over by other elements of the sentence, I think it makes sense
to describe that as a strategy of replacing verbs with nouns. The
grammar in that case ends up being different from what you'd get if you
replace nouns with verbs.

> As for the question asked, the idea of having one class covering both
> typical verbal and nominal concepts is an extremely common conlanging idea.