Re: allnoun

>===== Original Message From Constructed Languages List
>>The trick in AllNoun, IMHO, is that the other parts of speech besides nouns
>>
>>have been disguised as punctuation marks.
>
>Not only that but, e.g. in {table:on} {on} looks like and acts like a
>postposition.  I know 'officially' it is a noun meaning
>"thing(s)-something-is-on" but as Gary Shannon said of his 'nouns' which
>some thought were verbs: "If it looks like a verb, and walks like a verb,
>and quacks like a verb ... YIKES! it's a verb!"
I'm not sure how far you can push this argument, though.  I mean, surely
"perch" is a noun, and yet it means "thing-something-is-on."  "Location" means
"place-something-is-at."  In natlangs, semantic content which would
prototypically appear in one part of speech sometimes shows up in another.

>I say that {on} looks like a postposition, and walks like a postposition,
>and quacks like a postposition....YIKES!..........
>
>But I go further:
>{.act-of-throwing Joe ball:patient what:time.}
>
>How essentially is {patient} different from an object marker?  Why cannot
>{act-of-throwing} be construed as a verb?
And yet in natural languages, one can say, "I was the victim of a crime," and
no one doubts that "victim" is really and truly a noun, despite the fact that
it functions similarly to the word "patient" here, which you want to call an
object marker.  And how could you justify calling "act-of-throwing" a verb and
not calling the gerund "throwing" in English a verb?  It acts like a noun in
English, and act-of-throwing acts like a noun in AllNoun -- fits in the same
slots in the grammar.

>OK - it may be possible to define these morphemes as nouns in some
>theoretic, abstract way.  But to me at least a lot of the definitions seem
>contrived.  It is also possible, surely, to define the same morpheme rather
>differently?
>
>But let's return to what Ed said: "The trick in AllNoun, IMHO, is that the
>other parts of speech besides nouns have been disguised as punctuation
>marks."  I think Ed is right.
>
>I should make it absolutely clear that I do not for one moment mean 'trick'
>in some underhand, machievellian way.  I'm quite sure this is a _genuine_
>effort by Tom Breton to create an all-noun language of minimal grammar;
>I've no doubt of that.  And I also think that it was an experiment worth
>making.  Until something is actually tried one is arguing in the dark. But
>personally, I've concluded that it is not likely to possible to produce a
>language with what everyone is going to accept as a single part of speech.
And I don't think Tom every claims it's "all noun" -- he claims that it's "all
noun plus some punctuation marks."  Which is probably as close as you can get.

I *like* AllNoun, too, by the way, and I'm way impressed by it.

>
>OK - back to the main argument - those things 'disguised as punctuation
>marks'. [...]
>They're pronounceable - Tom calls them infixed words; I think of them as
>infixed morphemes.  However you read them, they don't look like nouns to me.
>
>But, I repeat, I enjoyed reading the experiment; I think it was worth
>making; it certainly gets one thinking - but IMO it ain't 'all noun'.
Ray,  I think that we have to accept that his nouns are really nouns.  If we
don't, to be consistent, we have to deny that natural language gerunds and
certain other nouns are nouns, and surely we can't do that.

This is how AllNoun works: in natlangs, the content of other parts of speech
can be squished into nouns (i.e. gerunds, nouns like "perch" and "location"),
and AllNoun simply pushes this tendency to its ultimate limit.

The problem of course is that nouns, unlike other parts of speech which
"modify" or "govern" other words, have no built-in way to relate to each other
in any coherent way, so Tom had to come up with his own, artificial way to
relate nouns to each other -- part-whole and role-value relations, expressed
with punctuator morphemes.

I think this is extremely extremely clever but unnatural and awkward to most
human minds.  If there were a way to implement it less awkwardly, I'd love to
use it in a conlang.

Ed

--
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Ed Heil ..................... edheil@mailandnews.com
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     "Koy tse tl'an tse tum gen nekom payaw;
           ts'enra me hlay man yatam."
"The noble nation of Atlantis is greatest among men;
    And its reign shall extend unto eternity."
          (from a Linear P inscription.)
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