Re: verbs?

Quoting "<Wilhelm Ulrich Schlaier>" <SMITHV637@...>:

> my only real thought was, couldn't a verb be a adjective instead of
> having a seperate catergory? verbs are just describing a noun's movment
> so they really ought to be nouns, right?
Not really.

Every human language has verbs, but not all human languages have a
distinct category of adjective.  Indeed, a great many languages use
stative verbs instead of adjectives.  Another option is to make
noun modifiers syntactically identical to nouns.  Georgian does this:
_umaGlesi_, for example, can either mean "higher", as in _umaGlesi
ganatleba_ "higher education", or just "the higher one/thing" if
it does fall within a NP.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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