Is a language with only nouns and verbs possible?

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by Fraggle Rocker, Dec 26, 2009.

  1. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    In another discussion, Delphi asks the following question:

    Would you say it's possible--or even practical--to have a language with nouns and verbs only? Chinese comes close, but it has particles, which play an integral part of the language and also serve to distinguish adjectives and such.

    I've been going over it in my head and come to a dead every time when it comes to modifers (head-last, etc.). Let's say it would be head last (big car, red shoe, etc.).

    What would be a practical way to do things like adverbs as they apply to verbs, for example? In English I would say "slowly walk." But with only nouns and verbs and being head last it would roughly be something like "slowness[n] way[n] walk[v]."
     
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  3. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    As an amateur linguist but a professional computer programmer who works with completely logical languages, I have opined more than once that Chinese in fact does have only nouns and verbs. Words that are customarily translated into English as adjectives, simply because English has adjectives so such translation makes the syntax seem less alien, are really stative verbs.

    Hong doesn't mean "red," it means "to be red," so hong che doesn't mean "(the) red car," it means "(the) being-red car." (Sorry I don't have the han zi character set handy and even if I did I only know a couple hundred of them.) And for that matter I think that the distinction between stative verbs and active verbs is something that was invented by Western linguists. Why do we translate kuai as "fast," rather than "to hurry?" Che kuai and kuai che can just as easily and correctly be translated as "(the) car hurries" and "(the) hurrying car" as "(the) car is fast" and "(the) fast car."

    And I think particles are vastly overrated as exceptions to my noun-verb paradigm. We regard the "particle" le as an adverb because it seems to serve the purpose of an adverb, even though we can't translate it into an English adverb. The meaning is: "the action expressed by the preceeding verb has either already taken place recently or will take place in the immediate future, but what's important to you is A) it is not taking place in the present and B) you have to figure it out from context." Ta lai le means "he just got here," whereas ta kuai lai le means "he'll be here in a moment."

    Same goes for ma, a "particle" that is used to turn declarative sentences into questions. Gou da, "the dog is big," vs. gou da ma, "is the dog big?" Whether you call ma a noun, a verb, or a particle, how do you translate it? It's a mouthful like le: "the preceding statement is to be interpreted as a question." Tone is phonemic in Chinese so you can't let somebody know you're asking a question by changing the pitch of your words as we can in the Indo-European languages.

    De is a merger of two particles spoken so quickly that they've lost their phonetic integrity, dei and di. Dei is a verb meaning "to be characterized by," and is used where we would use a past participle. We translate ke ai dei as "lovable" because "being-characterized-by being-worthy-of to-love" is just a tiny bit awkward. (And also because we've changed the sequence of the words to conform to English syntax and put dei first.)

    The Sichuan dialect of Mandarin is more conservative, with six tones instead of just four and many older forms of words. They still pronounce dei distinctly and they shout yao dei! "characterized by being wanted" the way we shout French encore! or Italian bravo!

    Di on the other hand is used to express a possessive relation or any type of subordinating relation. Ta di che, "she subordinated car," or "her car." (Yes, ta means he, she or it; there are no genders in Chinese.)

    De, the collapsed merger of di and dei, is also used generally to separate strings of "words" or morphemes in order to tell where one compound or one phrase stops and the next begins. Dao jia lai che, "approach home come car" isn't easy to understand so they say dao jia lai de che, "approach-home-coming car," "(the) car that has/is/will be coming home."

    But this is strictly a phenomenon of the spoken language. De is actually a placeholder used to help in parsing sentences. Chinese phonetics have been simplified over the millennia so there are now only 1,600 distinct syllables. Each one is a compression of three or four basic-vocabulary morphemes, and indeed the written language is a huge collection of homonyms, with 5,000 han zi in a basic-vocabulary dictionary. As a result, in written language de is often not necessary, because the meanings of the words are much clearer than in speech. More often than not, no placeholder is needed to correctly parse a sentence, so unless one is striving to record colloquial dialog accurately in a novel or a movie script, one would likely omit de in writing.

    In any case, the existence of a bare handful of particles that are, moreover, difficult to define precisely, does not, I think, invalidate my noun-verb paradigm. Show me a natural language with no exceptions!

    If we're looking for words that don't fit my paradigm, I'd suggest the numerals. San, "three." Is that a noun or a verb? Hard to say, since it's never used without a measure word. San ben shu, "three volumes of book." San tiao ju, "three head of cattle." San jang juo zi, "three slabs of table.' (Chinese has some amusing measure words and I don't even know most of them.)

    Oh but wait, san er, with no measure word, doesn't mean "three sons," but rather "third-eldest son," or as Charlie Chan would say, "(my) number-three son." This usage makes numerals start to look like nouns.

    Perhaps my noun-verb paradigm holds up!

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    I don't mean to set myself up as an authoritative scholar of the Chinese language. But I am frustrated by the paucity of material on this subject (without tracking down university papers) so I'm just doing my part to fill a vacuum. Maybe I'm wrong but I can help somebody else get it right.
     
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  5. granpa Registered Senior Member

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    hungry is an adjective. to hunger is a verb.

    'second' is an adjective (and therefore a kind of verb) but 'pair' is a noun. it isnt clear to me how to convert between them.


    'hurriedly, he left the store'. 'hurrying, he left the store'. seems to just be a kind of clause or something.

    prepositions like 'in' can obviously be replaced with verbs like 'occuping' (indeed most prepositions are just verbs). but 'to' and 'from' are difficult to figure out.
     
    Last edited: Dec 27, 2009
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  7. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Sure, and "hunger" is also a noun. In German they just say ich habe Hunger, in French j'ai faime. Spanish has the adjective hambriente but still they say yo tengo hambre.

    In Chinese, to avoid the ambiguity of monosyllabic homophones, instead of "I hunger" they say "my stomach hungers," wo du-zi e, literally "I stomach hunger" letting their inflexible syntax express the possessive relationship.
    "Two" is the basic word here. In many languages the word for "second" is clearly an inflected form of "two," such as German zweite. In Chinese they just say di er, di san, di si... "rank two, rank three, rank four..."

    "Second" is a word we borrowed from French after the Norman invasion, from the Latin word for "following," as in "the one who follows the first one"--cognate with "sequel" and "sequence." "Pair" is another French word, from Latin par, meaning "equal."

    English uses a standard inflection (fairly regular by English standards, anyway) to form all the ordinal numbers beyond three: fourth, fifth, sixth, etc. "Third" also falls into that paradigm; although phonetic shifts have made it almost unrecognizable, it's the German word dritte, from drei.

    "First" comes from "fore," and I don't know of any language in which the word for "first" is formed on the word for "one." Its basic meaning always has something to do with leading or being early. Except drily regular Esperanto, of course, in which the series is unua, dua, tria...

    "Second" as a verb comes from the arcana of parliamentary procedure. "I second the motion" is just an abbreviation for "I offer a second vote in favor of that motion, which in conformance with our rules requires that you now put it up to the entire membership for a vote."
    Technically a clause must be able to stand alone as a sentence, so that's just a one-word adverbial phrase. As I noted earlier, I maintain that Chinese has only nouns and verbs (with perhaps two or three unique exceptions that are difficult to catalog), so the verb "hurry" is used for "fast." Word order is used to express syntactical relationships, so they would say something like "he hurry leave store go." There's no tense in Chinese so if it's important they'd add a specific qualifier like "yesterday" or "two hours ago."
    In Chinese, relationships are all expressed by nouns and verbs or combinations thereof, which makes it much easier to express one in accurate detail. This makes Chinese a much more adaptable language than the Indo-European tongues, which struggle with a couple of dozen prepositions left over from the Stone Age. "The book is on the table": book occupy table top part. "The dog is in the house": dog occupy house interior space. More complicated relationships like the orbits of electrons and the levels of decomposition of a computer program are handled the same way, although they exceed my knowledge of the language.

    BTW it's not at all clear that prepositions always evolve from verbs. In the Indo-European languages prepositions go all the way back to the proto-language, which had a grammatical structure that any speaker of English, Spanish, Greek, Russian, Farsi or Hindi would recognize with only a little difficulty. Which leads to my cranky complaint that prepositions truly are relics of the Stone Age.
    Wo dao pu-zi qu: I approach store go, "I am going to the store." Wo cong pu-zi lai: I leave store come, "I am coming from the store." With thousands of verbs it's not really too hard to find one to describe a relationship, and if it is you can just use one of millions of verb-noun combinations.

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    Of course this would be cumbersome in English, but in Chinese all morphemes are monosyllables so it works just fine.
     
  8. Delphi Registered Senior Member

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    The "to" and "from" thing also stumped me, but this seems to make sense.

    But it seems a little awkward. I say that because the syntax seems SVO (and if it's not, let's make it that), yet the "go" and "come" are attached at the end. Could it be possible to say instead "I come leave store"?
    Makes sense. If there is a verb for the color red, then is there a noun for it? When you open up a Chinese dictionary, are words basically categorized as nouns and verbs (and particles)?
     
  9. Doreen Valued Senior Member

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    Just some brainstorming.....

    First thought would be that tones/speed of speech/posture could indicate what we do through adverbs. You might see this as cheating, but you could end up with no adverb words.

    Second thought: compound words with animals. He turtlewalk. You can argue that this is a compound word that includes an adverb, but then this assumes that they think this way. That they see it as walking with properties that turtle walking has. Whereas 'they', my hypothetical tribe, might view it literally. That the person is enacting turtles to some degree.

    Third, the language could be, simply, less subtle than others.
     
  10. granpa Registered Senior Member

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    he walk like turtle
    he walk resembling turtle
     

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