Re: Only verbs and nouns

En réponse à Danny Wier <dawier@...>:

>
> No flame coming from this direction. I've read that Arabic and general
> Semitic grammar is based on three types of words, that is, the verb,
> the
> noun and the particle. But honestly, I can't subscribe to that view,
> since
> adjectives can be derived from both verbs and nouns.
Nouns too. Yet we don't consider underived nouns and derived nouns as different
PoS :) .

 And since
> adjectives
> exist in the language, they are a part of speech. Same goes for
> adverbs,
> conjunctions, prepositions, the definite article, pronouns,
> interjections,
> and so on.
>
> I feel the attitude taken by the grammarian, whose name I forgot, was
> classical Eurocentris; he was probably implying that somehow Semitic
> languages aren't as sophisticated as Indo-European languages. But why
> can't
> one say that IE languages have only nouns, verbs and particles?
>
But I don't see how you can consider a description which has been the one of
Arabic grammarians since the Qoran has been written to be Eurocentrist. The man
you're talking about was only using a description that Arabic grammarians have
used well before European grammarians have even been interested in studying
Arabic languages. Arabic grammarians just consider adjectives to be a subset of
nouns (since they can take everything, including the definite article, their
view is not that wrong), and throw in particles every kind of word that doesn't
inflect. Still they do separate nouns and adjectives, prepositions and
conjunctions, but they put them in big categories of noun, verb and particle.
The difference is mainly that we try to put everything in one layer, while they
make two layers...

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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