Verbless conlangs (was: Lunatic Survey)

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Dennis Paul Himes wrote:

>     Sorry this response is so late.
No problem :)

>Pablo Flores <fflores@...> wrote:
>> How does Gladilatian have no verbs?
>> I tried to do this some time ago in Tomoulini Ganmaa, an humanoid alien
>> language. It worked, to a certain extent. In TG, words are usually
>> marked with suffixes indicating their function in the statement.
>>
>> Is this how Gladilatian works?
>
>     No.  In Gladilatian a word's function in the statement is determined by
>part of speech and word order.
>     Every Gladilatian sentence is a copula, i.e. it contains an implicit
>"to be".  Thoughts expressed as verbs in English are treated a number of
>ways in Gladilatian.
[snip examples]

That's extremely interesting! Also the tense markers on (pro)nouns, although
TG does that too, when needed.

TG uses some things that could be called verbs... I mean, if you take a nominal
root and add a suffix meaning "action", that could be called a verb. What I mean
is mostly that there are no verbal roots, or words that belong to a fixed class
that we'd call "verbs". The suffix indicating "action" doesn't have a special
status and can be applied to any word. Take for example the following utterance:

 _kaalare milinmaa choonlinjoonrunyei_
 "(they) used the same words"

where the last word means _choonlin_ "words", _joon_ "instrument", _ru_ "action",
_nye_ "past", _i_ "master" (forget that last one). The _ru_ action marker could
be dropped and the sentence would still be grammatical, tho it wouldn't make
explicit that an action occurred. It's mostly there to get modified by _nye_
(past tense marker). If _ru_ were omitted, _nye_ would modify "words-instrument"
and give something like "old/obsolete words".

The sentence could also be translated "their past usage of words featured equality".

(In conculture history, the first human to speak fluent TG was almost worshipped
by the Tomoulin as the only one with understanding among us, and his achievement
of simultaneous translation between TG and a human language was considered an
act of incredible heroism.)


--Pablo Flores

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Simurgies Mu"nt en Dhe'rrse^n Qaleme'vainthes Ro'veqar Thanon:
 Qgemp fasser dhe'ntarrthes o^pqann, qes quali'rambain mu"'ntentan runar
 hondnen qlonv ta^qlo'nv o^pqann.

Zymurgy's First Law of Evolving Systems Dynamics:
 Once you open a can of worms, the only way to recan them is
 to use a bigger can.

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