Re: Weird language idea

Quoting "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>:

> On Mon, Jul 07, 2003 at 04:15:44PM +0100, Peter Bleackley wrote:
> > I suppose that the difficulty with this sort of thing is that you
> > automatically find yourself reintroducing by the back door the very things
> > you've abolished to create the exotic atmosphere
>
> And thus you would end up with something not recognizably different
> a posteriori.  I had a similar issue; one of my original "brilliant"
> ideas for Dankaran (the family of my two active conlangs) was to have
> adverbs instead of adjectives.  As in, "the sky is bluely"; meaning
> "the sky goes about its business of existing in a distinctly blueish
> manner".
> But even with clearly-defined grammatical markers it would just
> appear that adverbs and predicate adjectives shared one; the intended
> distinction idea didn't come across.
_Is_ there a distinction? I mean, obviously English grammar treats adjectives
and adverbs differently, but is there any profound reason not to consider that
simply a case of agreement?

In my German classes, "open class" adverbs were classified as 'Adjektive',
with the label 'Adverb' reserved for "closed class" grammatical adverbs. Are
there any good arguments against this?

                                                         Andreas

PS For your particular example, it seems to me you're better off sharply
distinguishing the copula from the existential verb. You'd have "the sky is
blue" vs "the sky exists bluely", where "bluely" clearly modifies the verb.

Not that I'm sure what it means to exist bluely, but I can think situations
where a distinction would be handy. F'rinstance, someone that believes in the
spiritual beneficacy of giving alms, but does not want to be in need of them
him/herself, might reject the assertion "poverty is desirable", but agree
that "poverty exists desirably", ie that "the existence of poverty is
desirable".

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