Language with different PoS

A forum for all topics related to constructed languages
Post Reply
Alessio
sinic
sinic
Posts: 385
Joined: 03 Sep 2012 21:27
Location: Modena, Emilia-Romagna, Italy

Language with different PoS

Post by Alessio »

Hi, everybody! It's been a lot since I last posted here about a conlang of mine.
Looking at how different natlangs handle some parts of speech in quite curious ways, such as Japanese handling adjectives as if they were verbs or nouns depending on the adjective itself, I've come up with quite a weird thought: building a conlang lacking all of the traditional parts of speech, and finding another way to convey meanings not using verbs, nouns, not even subject and object and all of that.
This is no easy task, though, and indeed I have no idea where to start. I tried in the past, and I came up with the idea of having concepts expressed by words which could represent, unchanged, nouns, adjectives, verbs and whatever, but I think this still counts as having the traditional parts of speech, just expressed by the same word.

In my attempt, I made examples based on the word "auna", which would convey the meaning of a home. Based on context (and maybe its position?) it could also mean living, hospitable and anything related. Then, you could add suffixes to the word to add some other meanings; for example, "aunaśa" meant "there is a house", and I called this the "existential form", whereas "aunali" meant that the house was doing something typically house-y, like offering shelter or containing something, and this was the "typical form".

I could base a conlang on this and it would probably be an extremely messy nice one, but this is not what I want. I want something different, not relying on the old paradigm of "subject does action on object at moment in place"... something lying outside the border of what we consider to be a language.

Any idea for this project is appreciated. Comments saying that I'm crazy will be accepted but also laughed at, as it's pretty obvious that I am [:D]
:ita: :eng: [:D] | :fra: :esp: :rus: [:)] | :con: Hecathver, Hajás, Hedetsūrk, Darezh...

Tin't inameint ca tót a sàm stê żōv'n e un po' cajoun, mo s't'armâgn cajoun an vōl ménga dîr t'armâgn anc żōven...
Porphyrogenitos
sinic
sinic
Posts: 401
Joined: 21 Jul 2012 08:01
Location: Buffalo, NY

Re: Language with different PoS

Post by Porphyrogenitos »

I'm in my first semester of grad school in linguistics and we've discussed some related things in syntax and morphology. What I'm about to say may be rather incoherent but hopefully it will offer some guidance.

So, as you're aware, not all languages express the same concepts through the same "parts of speech" or "word classes". Examples:
  • English has a class of adverbs that behave differently than adjectives. Many languages don't have this, and use the same set of words to modify both nouns and verbs.
  • Some languages don't have adjectives, expressing them through verbs ("He is strong" = "He strongs") or perhaps a combination of verbs and affixes - e.g. in many Algonquian languages, basic adjectival concepts are expressed as prefixes on nouns.
  • Some languages don't have prepositions or postpositions, instead expressing "prepositional" concepts like direction, movement, relationship to the verb through case or verbal affixes.
  • Some languages don't have a distinction between nouns and adjectives. Proto-Indo-European was likely like this, and Spanish is still like this to this day - all adjectives can be used as nouns without any modification, all you have to do is stick an article in front of it. guapa "beautiful [feminine]" > la guapa "the beautiful woman".
And so on and so forth. Languages will slice and dice different concepts into different word classes in different ways.

Now, some linguists say that the noun-verb distinction is fundamental and universal - and looking at the languages of the world, you can see why they might say that. Virtually all languages have some kind of distinction between nouns and verbs - or rather, a noun-like word class and a verb-like word class. Some linguists take the view that word classes are not fundamental and universal, but that overall languages will tend to have a relatively more noun-like word class and a relatively-more verb-like word class, simply because of the nature of human cognition.

So, about your idea specifically, I think it's workable. There are a number of languages which cause certain linguists a lot of pain and add fuel to the fire about the noun-verb universality debate that allow very permissive use of root words like you're describing - e.g. a root word that means "man" could also be used as a verb, or rather, a predicate, meaning "is a man". Some even allow use of particles or prepositions in this way - e.g. a particle meaning "to" could be used as a predicate with the meaning "has a relationship to [something]".

So while you can have words behave in a very permissive manner like that, and while you can be creative and come up with a variety of different word classes that behave in different ways that don't line up with English parts of speech, I don't think you'll be able to truly get a away from predication, or something predicate-like - e.g. a verb-like word or clause that defines a situation, action, or relationship. That's my prediction, anyways. But if you find a way around that and want to pursue it, go for it.
Last edited by Porphyrogenitos on 28 Sep 2017 23:57, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Creyeditor
MVP
MVP
Posts: 5091
Joined: 14 Aug 2012 19:32

Re: Language with different PoS

Post by Creyeditor »

I like how Indonesian words sometimes are prepositions and verbs at the same time like 'sampai' which can mean 'until' and 'arrive'.
Creyeditor
"Thoughts are free."
Produce, Analyze, Manipulate
1 :deu: 2 :eng: 3 :idn: 4 :fra: 4 :esp:
:con: Ook & Omlűt & Nautli languages & Sperenjas
[<3] Papuan languages, Morphophonology, Lexical Semantics [<3]
Alessio
sinic
sinic
Posts: 385
Joined: 03 Sep 2012 21:27
Location: Modena, Emilia-Romagna, Italy

Re: Language with different PoS

Post by Alessio »

Here's an idea I came up with today:
1) Turn every sentence into a nominal predicate;
2) Rewrite subject, object and everything possible by means of a cause-effect paradigm.

Take the sentence "The door opens". First we need to rewrite it by getting rid of the verbal predicate, which can easily be done as "The door will soon be open"; we are taking into account the effect of the action (the door is going to be open), and adding a time specifier to make it clear that the original sentence featured a present, but of course, the "soon" part could be implied in the translated sentence.
Now, we need to turn "the door" into something else so that it can no longer be regarded as the subject of the sentence. I thought of something along the lines of "Because of the door, there will soon be an opening"̈. The door has become the cause of the sentence, and the "opening" is its effect. Now, since we are going to rewrite every sentence with a nominal predicate, we can leave out the copula, getting "door.CAUSE opening.EFFECT".

Now suppose that:
  • "door" is <do>
  • The cause is left unmarked
  • "opening" is <ope>
  • The effect is marked with <ne>
we get the sentence <do opene>, where we pretend that <do> is in the causative instead of the nominative and <ne> is the effect marker instead of a verb ending.
Kinda like when you are trying to simplify an equation and end up with the same equation, but with LHS and RHS switching sides.
Indeed, it didn't go as expected... but it might be the beginning of something... maybe?
:ita: :eng: [:D] | :fra: :esp: :rus: [:)] | :con: Hecathver, Hajás, Hedetsūrk, Darezh...

Tin't inameint ca tót a sàm stê żōv'n e un po' cajoun, mo s't'armâgn cajoun an vōl ménga dîr t'armâgn anc żōven...
User avatar
Xing
MVP
MVP
Posts: 4153
Joined: 22 Aug 2010 18:46

Re: Language with different PoS

Post by Xing »

Alessio wrote:
Indeed, it didn't go as expected... but it might be the beginning of something... maybe?
What went wrong?
Alessio
sinic
sinic
Posts: 385
Joined: 03 Sep 2012 21:27
Location: Modena, Emilia-Romagna, Italy

Re: Language with different PoS

Post by Alessio »

Take a look at my sentence:
do ope-ne

I gloss this as:
door.CAUSE opening-EFFECT

but I could also gloss it as:
door.SUBJ open-PRES.3SG

It's a bit like playing pretend. The sentence clearly has a subject and a verb, I'm just pretending it does not.

If we factor objects in, it becomes even worse. Take "I open the door". In this sentence, I am the cause, the opening is the effect, and the door is the affected party, which again, is just a way of saying that I am the subject, open is the verb and the door is the object. I'm not inventing anything new.

I'm trying to come up with examples that could prove me wrong about this, like, examples where the cause of something is not the subject, and the affected party is not the object. Kinda hard, since once you establish an effect, something must have done some action to cause it. Even if I say that Jim killed Joe because of jealousy (so the cause is not the subject), I could turn it around to say that jealousy killed Joe by means of Jim. It's a dog chasing its own tail.
:ita: :eng: [:D] | :fra: :esp: :rus: [:)] | :con: Hecathver, Hajás, Hedetsūrk, Darezh...

Tin't inameint ca tót a sàm stê żōv'n e un po' cajoun, mo s't'armâgn cajoun an vōl ménga dîr t'armâgn anc żōven...
User avatar
Threr
cuneiform
cuneiform
Posts: 98
Joined: 03 Nov 2014 20:10

Re: Language with different PoS

Post by Threr »

I think my conlang (deyryck) work just like this. It doesn't have, verbs nor nouns nor adjectives etc...
Words can carry a theme, depending on the situation, the translation in English will change.
Salmoneus
MVP
MVP
Posts: 3030
Joined: 19 Sep 2011 19:37

Re: Language with different PoS

Post by Salmoneus »

Alessio wrote:
It's a bit like playing pretend. The sentence clearly has a subject and a verb, I'm just pretending it does not.
Welcome to enlightenment.

[Or more specifically: welcome to why so many conlangers go through a "my language will have no verbs/nouns/subjects/etc!" stage, only to abandon it, and become unenthused by the endless supply of new attempts along similar lines.]

[The best you can manage in this way is to create a language with some unintuitive (to humans) argument allocation for some unusual situations, and sometime for complex sentences]
User avatar
lsd
greek
greek
Posts: 740
Joined: 11 Mar 2011 21:11
Contact:

Re: Language with different PoS

Post by lsd »

Nothing impossible, just be ready to be unable to translate common things in other languages...
Post Reply