Re: substantive and noun

Christophe Grandsire writes:
 > En réponse à Muke Tever <mktvr@...>:
 >
 > >
 > > Huh!  That is the opposite of what I learned.  I learned that
 > > "substantive" is
 > > the subset of "noun":
 > >
 > >     noun (L nomen, = name) substantive:
 > >         what we normally call nouns
 > >     noun adjective:
 > >         what we normally call adjectives
 > >     noun
 > >         substantives & adjectives together.
 > >
 >
 > Once again a result of the strange terminology used by English-speaking
 > countries. Internationally (it's the definition I learnt), the noun is a subset
 > of the substantive, not the other way round, and while noun and adjective can
 > be opposed, substantive put them together, and adds the pronouns to the mix.
 >
 > It's very common for instance to use the term substantive to refer to both
 > nouns and adjectives in languages which don't separate them formally.
 >
 > Christophe.
 >

Is it possible that the essential meaning of "substantive" is
orthogonal to the difference between nouns and adjectives (and certain
other parts of speech)?

I mean, may it be the case that the root meaning of substantive is the
ah, syntactic role, of heading a noun phrase?  Nouns and adjectives
form one class, and they're substantives when they act like a noun,
and adjectives when they modify a substantive?  I may be way off base
here, but I'm trying to piece this together.

Here's the beginning of Jäschke on the Tibetan adjective:

|  16.  In the Tibetan langage the Adjective is not formally
|  distinguished from the Substantive, so that many nouns may be used
|  one or the other way just as circumstances require.

Later on he talks about substantive verbs, but I'm not yet clear what
he means by it.

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