From Ti@fa-kuan.muc.de Fri Aug 04 12:15:02 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 10318 invoked from network); 4 Aug 2000 19:15:02 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m4.onelist.org with QMQP; 4 Aug 2000 19:15:02 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mu.egroups.com) (10.1.1.40) by mta1 with SMTP; 4 Aug 2000 19:15:02 -0000 X-eGroups-Return: Ti@fa-kuan.muc.de Received: from [10.1.10.114] by mu.egroups.com with NNFMP; 04 Aug 2000 19:15:01 -0000 Date: Fri, 04 Aug 2000 19:14:52 -0000 To: lojban@egroups.com Subject: Re: Beyond Whorf: "things," "qualities," and the origin of nouns and adjectives Message-ID: <8mf4nc+6qo9@eGroups.com> In-Reply-To: <398A6213.89FEBDD7@math.bas.bg> User-Agent: eGroups-EW/0.82 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Length: 1734 X-Mailer: eGroups Message Poster X-Originating-IP: 193.149.49.79 From: "=?iso-8859-1?q?Alfred_W._Tueting_(T=FCting)?=" --- In lojban@egroups.com, Ivan A Derzhanski wrote: > That's right. It also seems not to be an issue in the Iroquoian > and Salishan (and perhaps in some other American Indian) languages. > In others you can either verb a noun or noun a verb, but not > vice versa: in Nenets nouns conjugate (_xasawa-dm'_ `I am a man' > is no different from _xarwa-dm'_ `I want'), in Ket verbs decline > (becoming event abstractions when they do so). It's always been highly interesting to me learning that there are languages *grammatically* treating nouns, verbs etc. moreorless=20 the same way. So I'm still asking myself whether these people (at least originally) had the same perception of "things",=20 "qualities", "actions" etc. la .ivAn. knows that e.g. in Hungarian from a phrase "x-em" or "y-am" etc. one cannot be sure whether x or y is a noun or a verb=20 unless one knows the word x or y, i.e. its semantics respective: if it is, say, "k=E9z", "kezem" means "my hand", if it's, say, "n=E9z",=20 "n=E9zem" has to be translated as "I am looking at it (him/her)". With homophones (in theory) it could be really ambiguous:=20 e.g."v=E1runk" (our castle/we are waiting), "v=E1rom" (my castle/I'm waiting for it/him/her) etc. In Turkish, e.g. "T=FCrk=FCm" means=20 "*I am* a Turk". Maybe la tipitr., being a native speaker of Estonian (which is related to Hungarian) can tell us how he - using his mother tongue - is looking on "things", "qualities" and "nouns". (In Hungarian, there are indeed means to indicate nouns, namely the article "a" -=20 comparable to lojban /le/ - e.g. "a sz=E9p" the beautiful (woman?) or suffixes, like in "sz=E9ps=E9g" beauty. Other languages don't have=20 articles. Maybe Estonian doesn't have either.) .aulun.