Re: verbs?

 <Wilhelm Ulrich Schlaier> sikyal:

> 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?
To add, in a language like Fijian or Hawaiian, the system is really best
described as having two types of words: Substantives and Non-substantives (I
forget what the real word for the second is).   Non-substantives are basically
prepositions, conjunctions, bound morphemes and (possibly) pronouns.
Substantives are everything else.   Then you have grammatical categories, and depending
where a substantive ends up, it will take on a different grammatical category.
 So, using Hawaiian, take the substantive "noho".   It has to do with
sitting.   Here are some examples:

Noho ke kanaka.   /sit the man/ "The man is seated."
Nui ka noho.   /be-big the chair/ "The chair is big."
Nui ke kanaka noho.   /be-big the man seated/ "The seated man is big."

Looking at this from the English point of view, it appears that the "base"
form (let's say, "to sit") is zero-derived to be a noun or an adjective (or it
could be an adverb, but "sit"'s kind of an odd one to change into an
adverb--maybe "He does it sitting", i.e., "He does it while sitting down"?).   Looking
at it from the Hawaiian point of view, though, "noho" is just an idea
describing the idea of sitting down, and it surfaces semantically in a number of ways,
depending on how it's used in the sentence.

But, to address your basic concern, no, you don't have to be locked in to IE
classifications.   Polynesian languages have basically two categories, Semitic
three (well, Arabic, at least), and doesn't Lojban have only one?
Anything's possible, if you can imagine it.

-David