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All-verb (was: Look ma, No verbs!)

From:Raymond A. Brown <raybrown@...>
Date:Saturday, April 17, 1999, 18:57
=46e ysgrifennodd Mathias am 2:18 am -0400 16/4/99:
>Dans un courrier dat=E9 du 15/04/99 19:55:16 , Ray a =E9crit :
[...]
> Somewhen I must really try 'AllVerb' :-) >> > >I read it's been done already by a female conlanger I can't remember her >name.
Aw, ain't there anything original a poor conlanger can do? ;)
>And I think Nova is not so far from that ;-) given it describes items >as pertaining to broad categories which I feel as 'transitional or permanen=
t
>states' (it's a personal, 'psychological' viewpoint, not a grammatical one)=
=2E
>
------------------------------------------------------------------- A fe ysgrifennodd Denis Moskowitz am 10:33 am -0400 16/4/99:
>[Raymond A. Brown" <raybrown@...>]
=2E.....
>> Somewhen I must really try 'AllVerb' :-) >> >An all-verb (or atleast no-noun) language was mentioned in Jorge Luis >Borges's "Tlon Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (sp?) though not much developed >beyond a sample back-translation along the lines of "Above the >on-streaming it moons." (The moon is above the river.)
I'm reminded of 'flower' which crossword adicts will be know should more often than not be read as /flou@(r)/ =3D 'that ehich flows, a river' rather than the common or garden /flau@(r)/ ;) I like 'it moons'. Of course the initial 'it' is quite meaningless and languages which do not insist on a subject when there isn't one do this rather better, cf. for 'it is raining': Latin: pluit Italian: piove Spanish: llueve Romanian: plou@ [@ =3D a-breve] Novial: pluva In none of the above can the verb have a pronoun subject. Novial even has: nokta =3D it is night nokteska =3D night is coming on jorneska =3D day is coming (presumably one can also have 'jorna' =3D it is day, though Jespersen's Novial Lexike doesn't include it). So why not - *luna =3D "it moons" *luneska =3D the moon is beginning to shine? I've used Novial as examples not to imply support or otherwise for it nor to imply that I would use it as a base for 'All-verb' - I wouldn't - but merely for the sake of readily giving simple examples (and because I'm familiar with it). ----------------------------------------------------------------------- You guys have got me interested. Maybe there is something here ;) Ray.