Re: Verbless conlangs (was: Tense marked on nouns)

Sally Caves wrote:
>> JK wrote: after six
>> years it still doesn't have a lexicon ... blame mutating phonology.
> Well, work on it, and start building a lexicon, because I find this
> structure really fascinating.
Right away, ma'am!  Real Life (TM) can wait.

> Flattery always successful :)  yry myeebihs, "me all blushing red."
I don't think I've ever been addressed *in* a conlang before!  Cool.
'Yry' reminds me a lot of the Middle Egyptian 'jrj' ('with respect to
it', more or less).  I both hate and love the way Egyptian words shift
word class without telling you...

> This makes it possible for you to
> take off "man" from Tane vumer pol echelye ["A man is running
> towards his house"] and have it mean "Someone [is] running towards
> his house": vumer pol echelye.
Yes, precisely so.  And further: pol echelye = someone [is]
[moving?]towards [a/the] house.  Every constituent of a sentence can
be used as a meaningful and grammatical sentence in its own right, and
moreover that the truth of this sub-sentence is entailed by the truth
of the matrix sentence (allowing for conditionals, negatives etc.).

> In this way, all "full words" are
> nominalizations, in a way, so your language is verbless, but I think
> uniquely so.  I'll have to go review Kelen to see how it differs.
So will I.  When I first discovered the list and the fact that there
were conlangers other than myself and JRRT :), one of the biggest
surprises was that no-one else seemed to have come up with the T4
syntax independently.  It seems so natural to me.  I think perhaps the
sort of person who's attracted to that form of simplicity tends to go
for predicate-logic-type structures instead.

> Sylvia's original intention was to present a
> language that was alien to human thinking.
This makes me smile - my intention was to smooth the path of thinking
(not, please note, to reflect the structure of the thinking one is
already doing - T4 is no loglang) by clearing language of unnecessary
syntactic detritus.  Have I, in the process, also created an alien?  I
hope not ... but an artist's declared aims are very often not the ways
in which the art succeeds.

> [...] what this suggests to me is that you have full words that
> could function as verbs (as we know them, or in translations), but
> still refer to "thing/someone in a state of running."
Function *semantically* as verbs, yes - if there were no such words,
it would be very difficult to translate an English sentence into T4
(if it contained a verb).  When I say that there are no verbs in T4, I
mean that all words are created syntactically equal.  There are no
labels at the ends of the branches of a T4 syntax diagram except
'word'.  Some words in a sentence take an argument, others do not, but
every word of the language is capable of acting in both ways.

Thanks for your interest!  It makes a real difference, and may
even spur me to do something about the lexicon ...

Jonathan.

[reply to jonathan underscore knibb at hotmail dot com]
--
'O dear white children casual as birds,
Playing among the ruined languages...'
Auden/Britten, 'Hymn to St. Cecilia'