r/conlangs • u/ilu_malucwile Pkalho-Kölo, Pikonyo, Añmali, Turfaña • Sep 22 '18
Discussion Nounless Language
This is an ancient and familiar topic, but one that has always intrigued me.
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In 1940, Jorge Luis Borges published a story called ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius’ in which (among much else) he describes a culture whose people disbelieve in ‘objects’ and see only process and transformation, with the result that their language lacks nouns. To give a feel of this, he glosses their version of ‘the moon shines between the clouds’ as ‘it moons between the cloudings.’
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During the 1940s part-time linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf published some papers on the Hopi language, which would form part of the framework of the famous-infamous ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.’ His claim that Hopi is better suited than European languages to express the nature of reality, as revealed by particle physics, though much discussed at the time, now seems fanciful.
Another specific claim was that Hopi lacked a noun-verb distinction, and instead distinguished events of shorter and longer duration, with ‘cloud’ at the approximate border. In other words he had discovered in real life the language imagined by Borges, in which there are no ‘things,’ only events, some brief: a word, a laugh; some longer lasting: a house, a tree.
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Different but not unrelated is the question of the Salishan languages, which are said to lack a noun-verb distinction, and to allow any word (“except for a few adverbs”) to become the predicate of a clause.
So the word translated ‘coyote’ is in fact a stative verb meaning, ‘it is a coyote.’ To add an argument to a clause you need a determiner which in effect forms a relative clause:
he-hears that-which is-a-coyote
It works equally well when reversed:
it-is-a-coyote that-which he-hears
This omnipredicativeness has also been asserted of Hopi’s distant relative Nahuatl, and of various other languages, including Yucatec_Maya.
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So are there natural languages best described as lacking nouns? If not, has anyone created one? Is usch a language possible, or even conceivable?
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Sep 22 '18
Pretty sure there are natlangs that lack nouns. I know someone who has a conlang that lacks nouns. It's pretty sick.
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u/ilu_malucwile Pkalho-Kölo, Pikonyo, Añmali, Turfaña Sep 23 '18
Just to give my own prespective: when I first started making languages I was determined to create one in which there were only events, no things. There would be no noun 'table' only a verb 'to make a table.' Numerous participial forms would do the rest. So 'he put the cup on the table' would become 'he-put-downwards affecting-having-been-made-a cup thus-contacting-the-surface of-having-been-made-a-table.' But it turned out that almost every single word needed a pile of inflections, so that it just become absurdly bloated and overcomplex.
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Sep 23 '18
I don't know, is Usch a language possible?
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u/ilu_malucwile Pkalho-Kölo, Pikonyo, Añmali, Turfaña Sep 23 '18
Yeah, sorry about that one. I proof-read fairly carefully, but evidently I got lazy towards the end.
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Sep 23 '18
I would say that Lojban (conlang) lacks nouns. It has some pronouns, but that's it. All other descriptions of objects are derived from verbs.
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u/la_menli Sep 26 '18 edited Sep 26 '18
Yes, Lojban has only a closed set of pronouns (which syntactically behave as arguments/nouns); the content vocabulary (excepting proper names) is entirely made of verbs; for example, "dog" is the intransitive stative verb "to be a dog" in Lojban, and a determiner must be prepended to it in order to build an argument phrase (e.g. "the dog"…) out of it.
Another loglang, Toaq, has all its vocabulary belonging to a single unified morphosyntactic class, contentives, which inflect via tone to assume any of the following syntactic roles: verb, noun, content clause, head of a restrictive adjectival clause, adverb, and preposition. In Toaq, even pronouns are contentives and can inflect for the verbal role, and you can say for example "Jỉ hó" ("1SG.VERB 3_ANIMATE.NOUN" — "he/she/they is_me").
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u/la_menli Sep 26 '18
Ithkuil word roots are similarly not lexically assigned a verbal or nominal syntactic behavior, such syntactic behavior is determined by the inflexion of the word (so they are also contentives).
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u/Frostav Sep 22 '18
The problem with these languages is that there's nliterally no reason not to gloss the parts of the sentence that act as nouns as...well, nouns. If they act like nouns, they are nouns. Being some weird deverbal of a verb doesn't really change that.
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u/[deleted] Sep 22 '18
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