Re: Newbie says hi

At 8:22 PM -0500 11/4/02, Nathaniel G. Lew wrote:
>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.
I just looked at the website, and you distinguish between "concrete", "stative",
and "dynamic" words; only "stative" and "dynamic" words get to be transitive or
intransitive. Sounds like nouns and verbs to me. So what is the difference
between what you describe for Bendeh and the more traditional notions of 'noun'
and 'verb'? Clearly there is a morpho-syntactic difference between concrete
words on the one hand, and stative and dynamic words on the other.

Also, section 35 is titled "Inflection prefixes" but what you describe seems
"derivational" instead.

>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
Look at Nootka or the Salish languages if you're interested in languages which have
been described as having no noun/verb distinction (though not everyone agrees
on that description).

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                                               Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"It is important not to let one's aesthetics interfere with the appreciation of
fact." - Stephen Anderson