>From: Amanda Babcock <langs@...>
> I started a totally noun-based trigger language
>last year;
OK what is a trigger language? H.S. Teoh also mentioned that phrase.
>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 :)
What I thought would be cool is a system that totally did away with the
conventional categories and created whole new parts of speech.
>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").
I have encountered these tendencies of Japanese before, and it's the way
they subsume adjectives into verbs (is it a kind of relative or participial
clause?) that really made me think about this idea.
>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 -
Is that where for instance "house" can be put into different tenses - past
tense house = "ruins" etc.? I suppose you could use the past tense of
"parrot" in that Monty Python sketch :)
>...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.
What and where are these languages? Never heard of that.
>As for words that equal sentences, see polysynthetic languages.
Yep, Eskimo/Inuit... :)
>If nothing else, I bet you end up with a new section in your bookshelf :)
LOL, I'm already needing a new folder within my bookmarks, and another one
within my email!
Mat
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