Re: CHAT: New Member With Questions

Hi!

Brandon Denny <brandonjdenny@...> writes:
> 2)  Again With Word Classes.  Can a language make a distiction in class
> between, say, a proper noun, and a abstract noun?  Does any know of any
> languages that do?
I think that is perfectly possible.  Not speaking of abstract
vs. proper, but from what I understand, Mandarin Chinese distinguishes
times, places, possibly others.  I.e. it is grammatically incorrect to
use a normal noun when a time is required.  You could not directly
say: `I will come to your place after my class', because `class' is
not a time.  So you'd have to say `I will come to your place after the
end of my class':

   xia ke    yihou wo qu    ni     jia.
   end class after I  go-to you(r) home.

`xia' (the end) makes it grammatical.  The same holds analagously for
places (e.g. `ni jia' (your place) but not `ni' (you)).  Furthermore,
there are countable nouns vs. uncountable nouns.  Is this what you
mean by noun classes?

Bye,
   **Henrik