allnoun revisted

At 3:02 pm -0400 20/4/99, Ed Heil wrote:
=2E..........
>
>And I don't think Tom every claims it's "all noun" -- he claims that it's "=
all
>noun plus some punctuation marks."  Which is probably as close as you can g=
et.

I was thinking of this as I was driving into work this morning  :)
It came to that this is not so different from the traditional Chinese
classification of words into full words & empty words.  Tom actually refers
to his punctuators, as he terms them, as 'words'.  Aren't they the empty
words of his his language?

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  :-)

I discover BTW that the terms 'pleremes' & 'cenemes' actually do exist!

What it seems to me that Tom has done is to some extent do what I tried all
those years ago: to produce a language with just two parts of speech.  But
Tom goes one step further in that his pleremes are all explicitly
interpreted by him as nouns.
---------------------------------------------
At 11:08 am -0400 21/4/99, Mathias wrote:
>Dans un courrier dat=E9 du 20/04/99 20:03:42  , Ed a =E9crit :
>
><< And how could you justify calling "act-of-throwing" a verb and
> not calling the gerund "throwing" in English a verb?  It acts like a noun =
in
> English, and act-of-throwing acts like a noun in AllNoun -- fits in the sa=
me
> slots in the grammar.
>  >>
>
>Whether it's a noun or a verb does not really matter as long as the
>substantive or gerund refers to a process whose actors are the other nouns =
of
>the AllNoun sentence.
>the verb "to throw" is present in "throwing", "thrower", "projectile", etc.
>
>That's what all conlangers who tried an all-noun syntax are to experience.
And I suspect that's what conlangers who try an all-verb syntax are to
experience also.

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:
'A major peculiarity of Kinya is its lack of any morphological distinction
between categories like verb, substantive or adjective.  All words, with
the exception of a limited set of uninflected conjunctions, postpositions
and adverbs, have the same kind of flexion and are best approximated by the
concept of "noun". '

It's actually one of my favorites - but I guess the "minimal grammar"
business which, maybe is another chimaera anyway, is not part of Kinya's
aims ;)

Ray.