Why does it sound odd to you to say "He did it somewhere", but not "he did it here"? Or "Because of what did you do it?" but not "he did it because of his hope to eat"? Are you sure you're not just being informed by English's idiosyncracies?Parlox wrote: ↑31 May 2020 18:55 Hey it's been a while since I've been on.. And I have a quick question.
So a conlang I've been working on has no adverbs or adjectives, instead it uses nouns for both of these categories. My question is: What might be a good way to handle pro-adverbs like where/how/therefore/etc?
I was thinking of just using nouns like typical, but "the reason you did it?" or "He did it in a unknown location." for "Why did you do it?" and "He did it somewhere." just doesn't sound right to me.
Regarding the example in your next post: surely, if "speed" is marked for tense and voice and modifies the verb, it IS an adverb? Or at least a verb? I don't see why it's a noun in your example?
[and yes, it seems much more likely to me to have a language with few adverbs than to have one with none. After all, saying "once" and "now" and "maybe" is SO much easier than saying "on one occasion", "during the current period of time" and "in some but not all possible worlds"...]
-----
Pabappa: why wouldn't "reason" be an atomic word? It's - particularly in this sense, of 'cause' or 'motive' - a very basic word conceptually. I know English has a loanword, but that shouldn't lead us to think that it's somehow a word that languages won't often have some very basic word for - after all, you can't have many conversations without it! [it is, however, in a semantic area that's prone to shifts, precisely because it's so basic and yet not concrete - so it's prone to a lot of idioms forming. Like words for 'stuff' and 'thing' (which can also mean 'reason' in many languages, of course), which similarly are prone to invention, despite it being an extremely basic concept.
[Irish, FWIW, has fáth, meaning simply cause or reason, and it has meant that as the primary meaning since Old Irish (in OI it could also apparently mean 'prophecy'...). "Why?" is simply Cén fáth/, literally "what reason?". And cén is from cé+an, so even more literally "who the reason?"; similarly, "how?" is simply "what (/who the) path?"]
But of course, 'why' is open to idiomatic alternatives. In English, for instance, we often ask "what were you thinking?"...