Re: All-verb language - instalment 1

 --- Jonathan Knibb wrote:
> Estel - your all-verb idea is very interesting, and reminds me of my
> own conlang Telona.  I wonder on what grounds you distinguish your
> four verb classes; you say "distinguished mainly on semantic grounds"
> - mainly or purely?  If, for example, there are syntactic grounds for
> distinguishing between the verb classes, then I suspect you would
> find
> that they would not all be best described as verbs.
I'm trying to make it that there are very few, if any, syntactic
differences between them.  I call them verbs because the inflections
they take are typical of verb inflections: tense/aspect, subject and
object suffixes, maybe more.

> On the other hand, there may be no syntactic differences, and the
> classes may be distinguished only by the kinds of English words they
> translate (would you have had the same four classes if your first
> language had been Mandarin?).  But then you effectively have a
> language with only one syntactic word class (a goal of mine for
> several years!) - so why call the words verbs?
>
> The word 'verb' describes a particular syntactic type within a
> standard noun-verb-adjective-etc. system.  If all words are
> syntactically equivalent, then every word in your language must be
> capable of fulfilling the referential function of a noun, the
> descriptive function of an adjective, the oblique-argument-taking
> function of a verb, the anaphoric function of a pronoun, etc., etc.
Well, I have ways of inflecting my verbs so that they're more noun-like
and more adjective-like.

> I think of my Telona as an all-noun language, although every word may
> optionally take a 'direct object'.  When I'm creating words for
> Telona, I deliberately try to put together systems of reference and
> description that cut across the boundaries of the English parts of
> speech, which I think would be more natural in a language whose
> speakers know nothing of noun-verb distinctions.  Have a look at my
> (sadly incomplete) reference document at
> http://knibb.free.fr/030523.pdf - I'd be interested to hear whether
> you think Telona is really all-verb, or your language is really all-
> noun, or something in between. :)
I've had a bit of a look at it a while ago, but I should look again.

> your colleague in single-class conlanging,
> Jonathan.
Estel

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