From iad@MATH.BAS.BG Fri Aug 04 20:42:01 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 21885 invoked from network); 5 Aug 2000 03:42:00 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by m1.onelist.org with QMQP; 5 Aug 2000 03:42:00 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO lnd.internet-bg.net) (212.124.64.2) by mta1 with SMTP; 5 Aug 2000 03:41:58 -0000 Received: from math.bas.bg (ppp104.internet-bg.net [212.124.66.104]) by lnd.internet-bg.net (8.9.3/8.9.0) with ESMTP id GAA16991 for ; Sat, 5 Aug 2000 06:50:55 +0300 Message-ID: <398B2FBB.4C10F0C2@math.bas.bg> Date: Sat, 05 Aug 2000 00:03:55 +0300 X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.6 [en] (Win98; I) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban@egroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Beyond Whorf: "things," "qualities," and the origin of nouns and adjectives References: <8mf4nc+6qo9@eGroups.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit From: Ivan A Derzhanski "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