Re: Newbie says hi

On Wed, 30 Oct 2002 23:07:12 +0000, Mat McVeagh <matmcv@...> wrote:

>10) Similarly, on a grammatical level, I would like to design one that
broke
>out of a few common constraints of both natural and artificial languages.
>Something that broke down the verb/noun/adjective etc. hegemony, or
>isolating/inflecting/agglutinative. How about this for a suggestion: a
>language that doesn't clearly have the categories "word", "phrase",
>"sentence". Instead it has other levels of grammatical scale and
structure,
>which don't match up to those three. Imagine what that would do to the
>morphology/syntax division, or the three typological categories. I am very
>interested in Eskimo actually.
[*shameless self-promotion*]

Bendeh makes no distinction between nouns, verbs, and adjectives.  All
words (including prepositions) are substantives.  It seems to me that in
general, the more distinct the parts of speech of a language are, and the
more inherent part of speech as a category is in the lexical items, the
simpler the syntactic markers have to be (which is not to say that they
will be simpler!), and vice versa.  Of course there are exceptions, but
one might see this as a zero-sum system of syntactic information:  What is
carried in the lexicon doesn't need to be marked through inflection, and
vice versa.  The challenge of making Bendeh was to make the syntax as
flexible as possible without massive ambiguity, and still have no separate
parts of speech.  Given this constraint, the syntax that resulted is
pretty weird, and unlike any natlang I know of, although (and I am proud
of this) not at all difficult to learn.

http://www.geocities.com/natlew/bendeh/bendehmain.html

- Nat

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