Re: PoS & heretics (was: Cases and Prepositions (amongst others))

>From: Danny Wier <dawier@...>
>Subject: Re: PoS & heretics (was: Cases and Prepositions (amongst others))
>Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2000 19:04:15 CDT
>> >Ray Brown wrote:
>> >
>> >><soap-box>
>> >>This is one reason that I, personally, do not like the idea of
>> >>part-of-speech notation in an conIAL; it seems to me that one is
>>forcing
>>a
>> >>particular speech pattern - essentially Latin-based - onto something I
>>feel
>> >>would be better with the flexibility of English & Chinese.
>> >><end of soap-box>
>
>Not to mention that Arabic "technically" only has three parts of speech:
>verbs, nouns and particles (prepositions, conjunctions, relatives,
>demonstratives, definite article).  And most nouns are forms of verbs
>anyway.  Adjectives are in effect verbs of state.
Good point. The current definitions in traditional grammar often seem quite
shaky, just as recent discussions here on cases & prepositions have
revealed. Perhaps not completely shaky, but very much based on IE grammar.
Or that's how I perceive it.

>I personally see adjectives as nouns, since in many languages (or am I
>being
>biased towards IE and Kartvelian?) adjectives are declined as nouns, with
>minor differences with some
But adjectives can be made with verbs, eliminating the copula. Like "I big",
where 'big' is a verb ("?he bigs?").

Oskar
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