Re: Adjectiveless/verbless conlangs, etc. (Was: Re: LUNATIC SURVEY: 2005)

H. S. Teoh wrote:

>Did I ever get to tell you on #conlang how Ebisédian does just fine
>without true adjectives?
You did; it's with 'ni ... di' clauses. But that kind of clause would be
somewhat uglier in Omurax.

>> And it's probably extremely unlikely for a human culture to have a language
>> devoid of syntactic verbs, like the Omurax. Ah well.
>
>I don't see why that's so unlikely, especially given how you described
>the Omurax on #conlang as a philosophy-inclined people. Those are
>exactly the kind of people who'd be able to wrap their minds around
>the circumlocutions you need in a lang without syntactic verbs. In
>fact, such a thing probably appeals to them.
One possibility is that Omurax is a conlang even over *there*, constructed
out of an older language and having had its verbs removed to create a
bizarre language for cultic purposes. Somehow, this became the spoken
everyday language. Give it a generation or two and nobody'd know/care how it
came to be that way.
Or not: the descendant language Oirenax (from ou-iren-rax 'language with no
country') will have verbs; this might be because the temporal particles
fused with the predicate adjs/nouns (and translatives of the same), or it
could descend from a pre-deverbed form of Omurax.

>Now, having a lang devoid of *semantic* verbs, OTOH, ... :-) I don't
>remember who I told it to, but I had this idea of a race of beings
>that exist in timelessness, a place where time is geometric rather
>than temporal, and so they describe events exactly the same way they
>describe shapes. I suppose this would qualify under the freaklang
>category.
Very freaky. So far I don't know of any conlang that's semantically
verbless. That'd involve just not expressing action concepts at all.

>lol... LOL... I love that phrase, "powerfully stupid". _kiapat koko_.
>_kakari koko_. :-)
My favorite version has to be "monumentally stupid", which I first saw in a
Calvin and Hobbes comic. Taking the 'monumental' part literally, I get this
impression of someone doing or saying something so brainless that all
witnesses stare stunned in morbid fascination like they're looking upon an
awesome and eternal monument to stupidity.
Too bad I don't have a phrase for that in any conlang yet.

>> Yup. If I had unlimited time I'd learn a few of them. But I don't. The one
>> I've learned the most of is Ebisedian. Its sheer weirdness hooked me.
>[...]
>
>ji'ne kele? :-)
ji'e, here' usi'ny ebu' su 3t3mi3'. (Does that make sense?)

M

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