Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Beyond Whorf: "things," "qualities," and the origin of nouns and adjectives

From: Ivan A Derzhanski <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 05 Aug 2000 00:03:55 +0300

"Alfred W. Tueting (Tüting)" wrote:
> It's always been highly interesting to me learning that there are
> languages *grammatically* treating nouns, verbs etc. moreorless
> the same way.

To me too; it is something I enjoy exploring in my own conlanging,
which has for many years been inspired by a footnote in Sapir's
_Language_: `In Yana the noun and the verb are well distinct, though
there are certain features that they hold in common which tend to
draw them nearer to each other than we feel to be possible. But
there are, strictly speaking, no other parts of speech. [...]'

> So I'm still asking myself whether these people (at least
> originally) had the same perception of "things", "qualities",
> "actions" etc.

Arguably all people's perceptions of those categories show certain
similarities that languages explore to one extent or the other.
It's just that some languages make more of them than others.

> 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
> unless one knows the word x or y, i.e. its semantics respective:

Yes, only in Hungarian this is a vestigial feature that only affects
parts of the paradigms, whereas in Nenets it is vigorous -- nouns
conjugate just like verbs. Or to put this in a different way,
a word does not conjugate because it is a verb, but because
you have chosen to make it a brivla. So Nenets would be just
like Lojban if it were just as easy to make anything a sumti,
but afaik it isn't.

> In Hungarian, there are indeed means to indicate nouns, namely
> the article "a" - comparable to lojban /le/ - e.g. "a szép"
> the beautiful (woman?) or suffixes, like in "szépség" beauty.

Correction: _-ság/-ség_ `-ship, -ness' does not indicate a noun,
it forms one. You're right about _szép_ `beautiful (woman)' though:
this shows how thin the line between adjectives and nouns is in
Hungarian (much thinner than in most IE lgs, because Hungarian
adjectives don't inflect for gender). Still, there is a line:
`beautiful girl' is _szép lány_, not *_lány szép_ -- the less
nouny item (beauty) must modify the more nouny one (girlhood).

--Ivan