Re Grammatically radical languages (was Re Newbie says hi)

>From: Jeff Jones <jeffsjones@...>
>
>First of all, welcome to the list, Mat! I suppose you don't mind my jumping
>in to the discussion.
Thanks - Please do ;)

>On Fri, 1 Nov 2002 06:16:51 +0000, Mat McVeagh <matmcv@...> wrote:
> >
> >What I thought would be cool is a system that totally did away with the
> >conventional categories and created whole new parts of speech.
>
>Yep. The catch is, you'd have to come up with a whole new set of terms,
>which would have to be explained. For example, in some of my would-be
>languages, most words can be used _syntactically_ as verb (head of clause),
>coverb (adverb/adposition), adjective (qualifier), or noun (head of phrase)
>with 2 or 3 cases, regardless of the word is _semantically_ a verb
>(denoting an action), an adjective (denoting a quality), or a noun
>(denoting a set of entities).
>
>I'd like to see what you come up with for your language.
I haven't decided yet, because this language we're talking about is one I
haven't started yet, I only have the vaguest plans for it. It would
basically be an exercise in seeing whether such a project was possible; it
wouldn't have to work specially otherwise.

I think of it as kind of 'alien'. My motivations are coming from places not
just to do with linguistic considerations ("can we communicate this way?")
but also philosophical, psychological, even spiritual considerations. I'm
interested in seeing if we can break out of our conventional worldviews by
exploring previously unknown linguistic structures. Lateral thinking via
lateral speaking. I'm thinking that maybe the most important way in which
the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis might be true is not in terms of one specific
human language trait over another, but in terms of language universals - all
the more so because we cannot see them.

I would like to scrap nouns, verbs etc. and start again. If I can find a way
to express the same reality/experience in terms which don't use established
word classes, but instead other ones, I will have shown that some supposed
linguistic universals are not really universal at all. And I will have
opened human awareness up to whole new ways of looking at the world.

Mat


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