Re: allnoun revisted

Raimundus A. Brown scripsit:

> Rather more than four decades ago I coined the terms 'pleremes' & 'kenemes'
> (from Greek) to denote these terms and actually started to develop a
> conlang with these two parts of speech.  I'd forgotten this till I was
> musing in a traffic jam this morning  :-)
Interestingly, the terms "pleremic" and "cenemic" are standardly applied
to writing systems, meaning roughly "meaning-based" and "sound-based".
(Specifically, the symbols of pleremic writing systems *represent*
senses, whereas the symbols of cenemic writing systems *discriminate
between* senses.)

No writing system is entirely either, but Spanish is very cenemic,
whereas Chinese is very pleremic.

> Maybe a better approach is to dispense with the noun-verb distinction.
> Kinya also has only two classes of words, rather like my pleremes & cenemes
> of 45  or so years ago, namely a large, open set of inflectable words and a
> small, closed set of uninflectables; I quote:
The Loglans also have this characteristic, though they classify the
closed-class words into 100 or so subclasses ("lexemes", "selma'o")
depending on their exact roles: it is guaranteed that any word can be
replaced by any other word in its subclass without changing the
grammaticality of the utterance.

Of course, Loglans are verby and Kinya is nouny.

--
John Cowan      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
        You tollerday donsk?  N.  You tolkatiff scowegian?  Nn.
        You spigotty anglease?  Nnn.  You phonio saxo?  Nnnn.
                Clear all so!  'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)