Hallo conlangers!

On Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:48:06 +0100 R A Brown wrote:

> On 19/04/2012 00:45, And Rosta wrote:
> > Alex Fink, On 18/04/2012 15:20:
> >> On Wed, 18 Apr 2012 08:59:34 -0400,
> >> Sai<[log in to unmask]>
> [snip]
> >> Naw. From what I understand I'm fairly sure And's
> >> Livagian lacks content word classes in very much the
> >> way UNLWS does, despite being spoken.
> >
> > Quite so. A single open class of stems, and a single
> > closed class of suffixes and clitics.
> 
> Reaching a temporary impasse with Outidic, I turned again
> to Brx - and what do I find on the inflexional morphology page?
> 
> "As neither nouns nor verbs in Brx will have any grammatical
> inflexions, there is no formal morphological distinction
> between them. There is only one class of words with lexical
> meaning."

This is true with many engelangs.  AFAIK, Loglan and Lojban also
do not distinguish between nouns, adjectives and verbs - from the
standpoint of formal logic, they all denote predicates, and are
thus treated the same in these languages.  In my abandoned
briefscript loglang X-1, there is also no distinction between
nouns, verbs and adjectives, nor is there in my dormant speedtalk
project X-3.

> [...]
> 
> I've referred more than once in the past to Paz Buenaventura
> Naylor's paper on "NOMINAL SYNTAX IN VERBAL PREDICATIONS". I
> quote:
> {quote}
> For so long, most linguists have accepted as conventional
> wisdom that "all languages must have nouns and verbs". But
> while all languages have a way of referring to things and a
> way of referring to actions and events, these ways of
> referring are not necessarily grammaticized as noun and verb.

There are quite a few concepts that are denoted by nouns in
some natlangs and by verbs in others.  The boundaries are fuzzy,
and logic tells us that both are predicates, which is why loglangs
do not have a noun/verb distinction.

> .......
> With the “verbal word” (the term used by Givon [1979] for
> the pretheoretical concept of “verb”) being syntactically a
> noun in a language of this type, then the syntax of its
> verbal predications cannot but be nominal in structure. Such
> nominal syntax of verbal predications is made evident in a
> language like Tagalog by the genitive marking of the noun
> that is immediately dominated by the verbal word. (Chomsky
> [1992] has in fact asserted that genitive is a nominal
> relation.) As Lopez (1928:51) said of Tagalog, referring to
> the verbal word as “quasi-verb”:
> 	The quasi-verb is not a pure real verb, for it is
>   	treated like a _nomen_ in the sentence and its
> 	enlargements, according to their form, are
> 	considered as _attributes_ and not as _objects_
> 	(italics mine).
> {/quote}

I have heard of Basque and Welsh that they do not use finite
lexical verbs very often in their colloquial registers, rather
infinite forms such as verbal nouns.  These languages may be
on their way to something like Kêlen (let's hope they don't
die out before that - they appear to be out of immediate
danger right now, but their future cannot be considered
certain).

Maybe a modern descendant of Old Albic will have lost its
finite verb forms, with only verbal nouns remaining ...

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