Re: Weird language idea

Quoting Peter Bleackley <Peter.Bleackley@...>:

> All the talk last week about the difficulty of creating a truly alien
> language re-inspired an idea that's been floating round my head for a
> little while, for a language with only one part of speech and one
> syntactical rule.
>
> The one part of speech is the "state". This can function as a noun, a
> stative verb, or even a function word depending on context. The one
> syntactical rule is that each state modifies the one preceding it. Any
> thoughts?
Like Christian, I've got a hard time to figure how this would work.

F'rinstance, say that we want to translate an English intransitive sentence.
Presumably, we'd use a "state" describing the verbal action, and modify it by
further one's that specify subject and object. Unfortunately, only one word
can modify the first state, so there goes that idea. It seems to me that a
word must be able to take multiple arguments.

Or could one treat predicates as modifiers to their subjects?

                                                            Andreas

Reply