Re: Newbie says hi

Hi!  Just thought I'd chime in on one of your points -

On Wed, Oct 30, 2002 at 11:07:12PM +0000, Mat McVeagh 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.
I've been having fun with this idea for the last few years.  (Conlang fever
only comes over me for a couple weeks or months per year, so my conlangs
evolve in slow motion :)  I started a totally noun-based trigger language
last year; now I'm trying to get a new one off the ground that has only two
parts of speech, noun and verb, which pingpong between each other with each
derivational affix :)

Some natural languages can provide hints.  In Japanese, adjectives either
act just like verbs (the native i-adjectives) or they look suspiciously
like nouns (the na-adjectives), and most of the things that we encode as
prepositions, they use nouns for (similar to our use of "front" to make
"in front of").  This can be very inspiring.  Now I'm looking into Mohawk,
thanks to some suggestions from this list, where most of the nouns seem
to be built out of verbs - an idea I tried to do in high school and gave
up on on the grounds that it was unrealistic!  (I should have kept going.)

> 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,
I was just reading about this the other day.  I think it was in the book
"Language Typology and Syntactic Description: Volume 2, Complex Constructions",
which I bought a few years ago after it was (yes) recommended on this list :)
Anyway, whichever book it was, I was reading a section on chaining languages.
They specifically mentioned that some of these languages seemed to have
nothing corresponding to a sentence; rather, they naturally organized into
simple clauses and paragraph-length chains of clauses.

As for words that equal sentences, see polysynthetic languages.  Hmm, I
wonder if there are any polysynthetic, chaining languages...  It seems
kind of unlikely as polysynthetic languags are big on specifying the
subject and object very clearly, while chaining languages *under*specify
the subject, only identifying it in the main clause...

> I think I am going to enjoy being on this list, :)
If nothing else, I bet you end up with a new section in your bookshelf :)

Amanda

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