Timeline for Does any linguist honestly believe that nouns and verbs are not universals?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
11 events
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| Apr 26, 2021 at 19:52 | comment | added | jlawler | And to avoid any misunderstanding, I am no longer in exile. | |
| Apr 26, 2021 at 19:48 | history | edited | jlawler | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Feb 17, 2015 at 0:56 | comment | added | user6726 | To avoid any misunderstanding, John Lawler bears no responsibility for my Skagit example, which is not data. I constructed it for educational purposes based on published examples and my elicitations from Taqʷšəblu. So don't go quoting it. | |
| Feb 16, 2015 at 3:26 | comment | added | john lawler in exile | They were elicited in the sentences. I'm not a native speaker and I have no sense of cruciality. All we have is texts. There are no more native speakers, though there are fairly fluent adult learners; this always changes things, in unpredictable ways. | |
| Feb 16, 2015 at 1:16 | comment | added | user6726 | There's a problem with the premise that there is something in Skagit that mirrors English bare nouns. ʔəsʔəɬtəb ʔə ti stubš ti biac. I don't know if omitting the articles (ti) is possible: were the articles crucial to you? | |
| Feb 15, 2015 at 16:07 | comment | added | john lawler in exile | I don't speak any Eskimo languages, and Man eats meat is a generic sentence with two generic nouns and a generic verb. Thast's such a complex abstraction I hardly know how to say it in any language except English, where I wouldn't in fact say it because it's so vague.. | |
| Feb 15, 2015 at 16:05 | comment | added | john lawler in exile | No, that wouldn't work. Because there would still be a formal difference between nouns and verbs, different in each language, which would not correlate with reference but with usage. We say "bear" is a verb in "bear fruit" but a noun in "see a bear", and their reference is irrelevant. To give only one example. We don't "define nouns" at all. Nouns are. Nouns exist; they can be observed, determined, predicted, used. Definitions are for mathematics. | |
| Feb 15, 2015 at 7:20 | comment | added | user8144 | Just for curiosity: does Eskimo or Skagit say: "Man eats meat" in one word or in more than one? Akso in German there are words than can take half a page, but that does not make them sentences ... | |
| Feb 15, 2015 at 7:15 | comment | added | user8144 | Thank you for this extensive answer. Entities and events/processes are facts of nature and do not depend on the language one happens to use. So if we define nouns as those words that usually refer to entities (mama, sun), and verbs a those which usually refer to events/processes (eat, breathe), we should conclude that all languages must have nouns and verbs. But if one uses other definitions for the terms "noun" and "verb", we get other answers. The examples you give do not really change this summary, I guess. | |
| Feb 15, 2015 at 7:12 | vote | accept | user8144 | ||
| Feb 14, 2015 at 20:34 | history | answered | john lawler in exile | CC BY-SA 3.0 |