Re: verbs?

En réponse à JS Bangs :


>[1] Except for some Languages Of Unusual Structure (LOUS's [2]) which are
>reported to exist by a thread here a few days ago. Personally, I don't
>beleive they exist.
I have a source reporting the case of Nootka, a language of British 
Columbia. It insists that in this language, there is *no* mark that allows 
to dstinguish two different PoS. Even appositions can take any affix. It 
gives an example (which I will try to render as good as I can with this 
ASCII medium):

?u:yuqwa-si-cuX ha?ukwap (X is supposed to be a chi and in qw and kw the w 
is a diacritic)

which is analysed as: patient.apposition-indicative-I.you feed. As you see, 
here all the verbal marks are put on the apposition rather than on the word 
with the verbal meaning. According to this source, this structure, which is 
translated as "It's you that I fed" is rare, but not contrived, and only 
one example of the near complete freedom you have in Nootka to put affixes 
onto words. In Nootka, only pragmatic and semantic considerations allow you 
to categorise words (and those considerations are thus sentence-dependent). 
Syntactically, there is only one category of words.

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.