How to Not Verb

[Khemehekis]

Fiat Lingua has just (as in less than an hour ago) run an amazing article on verbless languages.

Check it out: http://fiatlingua.org/2020/04/

The classic Kēlen is, of course, mentioned. But it also discusses a Mark Rosenfelder language (Elkaril) and even our own MONOBA's Siųa!

[lsd]

interesting considerations on languages without verbs...
especially for a verbless language constructor (thank you for sharing)...

it's difficult, a posteriori, to say that a language has or has not verbs...

but I totally agree with the introduction and the conclusion: "'it's a good way for a conlangers to create constraints for themselves that can inspire greater artistic creativity" and "be open to checking whether critics analyses really adds any descriptive value to your project"

even if the constraint of the absence of verb was not the first one for me, it results from previous a priori choices...
even if I never let my work to critics, it's a very personal idiolect, my vision on it varies between "with" or "without verb" with many of the arguments seen in this essay...

but building and using a language is different from describing it...
and a conlanger is certainly the worse linguist to describe it...

for me, the current goal is to find the weltanschauung of the language to have an inner and different view on the world, and verbless view could help...

[Creyeditor]

I wasn't impressed by the premise of the article, but I really enjoyed reading it after all, especially the Davidsonian Semantics idea. I had been working on something similar from some time and I wasn't satisfied with the result and now I know why.

[Imralu]

None of my conlangs, for at least the last ten years, has had a lexical noun-verb distinction among content words. The ways a lot of the example languages in that article go about it are far more exotic than what my languages do, I think, and I can't get my head around some of them.

There are generally two ways it works in my langs:

1) In the majority of my languages, content words can essentially be thought of as nouns. The predicate is introduced by an invariable copular particle (usually i because that lends itself well to forming diphthongs and not adding extra syllables) (marked blue below). Genitive attributes (or sometimes just unmarked attributes) take the place of objects.

• Ngehu:
  
  (1a.)
  Hu ya hide la i ŋge (ya) mbimbi.
  man GEN yonder woman COP hunter (GEN) pig
  That woman's husband hunts / is hunting pigs.
  That woman's husband is a hunter of pigs / pig hunter.
  
  Flipping the sentence about the copula results in a semantically identical sentence with different topic and focus.
  
  (1b.)
  Ŋge (ya) mbimbi i hu ya hide la.
  hunter (GEN) pig COP man GEN yonder woman
  The hunter of pigs / pig hunter is that woman's husband.
  The one who hunts / is hunting pigs is that woman's husband.

2) In my language Iliaqu, content words can essentially be thought of as verbs (which I call "verbals" just to avoid the trap of thinking of them as equivalent to English verbs). Arguments/adjuncts are introduced by a word from a highly inflecting closed class that consists essentially of pronouns/determiners, which I just call "nominals" (marked red below). A verbal (or verbal phrase) following a nominal can be thought of as a kind of relative clause.

• Iliaqu:
  
  (2a)
  Vuja (ji) vaku ju muja ŋ-ujiio lima.
  hunt (ACC.3P.NSPEC.ANIM) be.pig NOM.3S.DEF.ANIM.ICS be.man COP-GEN.3S.DEF.ANIM.ICS.DIST be.woman
  That woman's husband hunts / is hunting pigs.
  That woman's husband is a hunter of pigs / pig hunter.
  
  The prefix ŋ- marked in blue above, although glossed as "COP" is essentially a means of allowing a determiner to exist within a verb phrase, preventing it from marking the beginning of a new argument/adjunct. Without this, it would be an argument/adjunct relating back to the sentence-level predicate. (It is glossed as "COP" because essentially it is a copula as it is needed in all instances of converting a nominal into a verbal and it can of course also be used as the head of the predicate, such as in "nnu nu" meaning "I am me.") In this case it subordinates "that woman's" to within the verb phrase headed by muja meaning that it refers to the man, not to the hunter described in the predicate.
  
  "Flipping" the sentence in the manner above requires not only swapping the verbal phrase marked with the nominative determiner with what is in the (unmarked) predicate, but also subordinating, where necessary, anything else that was hanging from the old predicate (and optionally desubordinating anything that refers to the new predicate).
  
  (2b.)
  Muja (ŋ-)ujiio lima ju vuja (n-ji) vaku.
  be.man (COP-)GEN.3S.DEF.ANIM.ICS.DIST woman NOM.3S.DEF.ANIM.ICS hunt (COP-ACC.3P.NSPEC.ANIM) pig.
  
  The subordinating ŋ- on ŋujiio is optional now that its head, muja, is the predicate. Without it, it would be possible to move the genitive adjunct ujiio lima to a position later in the sentence. Similarly, in sentence 2a., it would also be posible to use nji vaku or to move ji vaku to later in the sentence, but because the accusative argument is much shorter in 2a. than the heavier nominative argument, it will tend to precede it, and if the speaker wants to subordinate vaku to within the phrase of vuja, the subordinated determiner nji would be almost completely redundant as vuja vaku (≈ "be a pig hunter") would almost certainly be interpreted to be the same as vuja nji vaku (≈ "be a hunter of pigs").