Talk:Conlang/Advanced/Grammar/Noun-Verb distinction

Untitled
Does not lojban lack the distinction? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.108.161.88 (discuss • contribs) 13:10, 23 August 2008


 * There seem to be several different routes to destroying the distinction, actually. Replace both with predicates (but name words are a flaw in this, aren't they?).  Omit verbs, as in AllNoun or Kēlen.  Polysynthesis, as described here; the example that springs to my mind is Qþyn|gài.  --Pi zero (talk) 12:47, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Tagalog???
Actually, Tagalog and several of its related languages lack this distinction. The core vocabulary in Tagalog consists of 1. function words or "full words", and 2. grammatical words or particles. The function words can generally alternate between nominal, verbal, adjectival and adverbial functions. Bloomfield wrote in 1933, "In Tagalog, the parts of speech are, again, full word and particle, but here the full words are subdivided into two classes which we may call static and transient. The latter resemble our verbs in forming a special kind of predicate (the narrative type with four subtypes, Sec. 11.2) and in showing morphologic distinctions of tense and mode, but they differ from our verbs because, on the one hand, they are not restricted to the function of predicate and, on the other hand, there exist non-narrative predicates." (Italics added by Paz Buenavista Naylor in "Subject, Topic and Tagalog Syntax" 1995 in Subject, Voice and Ergativity, ed. David C. Bennett, et al.) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.105.4.112 (discuss • contribs) 18:41, 14 June 2012

Renaming
I think it would be good to rename this page to something like Word Classes or Destroying/Removing Word Classes, to make the topic more open. It would be possible to generalize the different ways of replacing some word classes for example in a table (replaced class | replaced by). Columbus240 (discuss • contribs) 16:35, 9 September 2015 (UTC)


 * This deserves plenty of thought before acting, of course, but while we're brainstorming, how about "Rearranging word classes"? --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 16:47, 9 September 2015 (UTC)


 * That would be a good idea. I just came up with it because there are so many ways of omitting (I'm not quite sure. I mean "not implement") a word class, so a generalization would be useful. I thought about one section per set of word classes being merged. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Columbus240 (discuss • contribs) 15:58, 10 September 2015

Clarify noun elimination
Re: "Other conlangers have attempted to eliminate all nouns. One approach is to replace nouns with a series of adjectives that modify a pronoun, similar to the way Toki Pona expresses the noun "soldier" with "jan utala" (literally "fighting person") from jan (person) utala (fight) or the proper noun "Lisa" with "jan Lisa" (literally "Lisa person")."

Isn't "person" a noun? If it isn't in that language, please clarify. (For example, in Cantonese, surname is a verb.) Thisisnotatest (discuss • contribs) 13:12, 13 December 2015 (UTC)


 * I believe that word in Toki Pona is a noun, yes. The passage you quote was suggesting, I think, that one could have a series of adjectives modifying a pronoun, similar to the way Toki Pona takes a very general noun and modifies it to get something more specific; similar to, but not identical to because the word being modified in the Toki Pona is a very general noun but not as general as a pronoun.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 22:48, 13 December 2015 (UTC)