Re: Newbie says hi

On Tue, 5 Nov 2002 12:56:06 -0700, Dirk Elzinga <Dirk_Elzinga@...>
wrote:

>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.
Hi Dirk,

I'm hoping for more discussion, since some of this applies to my languages
as well, but I haven't seen a reply from Nat Lew yet. I suspect that "no
distinction" was an unintentional overstatement on his part. I may have
misread his website, but I think that the difference between "concrete",
"stative" and "dynamic" is *morphosemantic* (if that's a term) but not
*syntactic*.

>Also, section 35 is titled "Inflection prefixes" but what you describe
>seems "derivational" instead.
I'd agree with this.

>>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).
I took your suggestion myself and googled for Nootka language.
Unfortunately, I have no skill at web searches, and got more results than I
could look through. A lot of descriptions of books I can't buy, and pages
with only incidental references, mostly by conlangers. There was one that
mentioned Chinese language classes at Nootka elementary school.

Jeff

>Dirk
>--
>Dirk Elzinga                          Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu
>
>"It is important not to let one's aesthetics interfere with the
> appreciation of fact." - Stephen Anderson

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