Re: languages without verbs?

Ruud Harmsen wrote: 
Wed, 03 Aug 2005 13:51:47 +0200: Artem Baguinski <artm@xxxxx>: in
sci.lang:


Can any natural language be shown to have no verbs? 


I think so. Most English words can be used as almost anything, so I'd
be tempted to say tha English doesn't natively distingish verbs, nouns
etc. It only seems to because grammarian look at it from a Latinist
point of view.


I don't think so.

If linguists excuse my ignorance, here's my point of view:

A large group of english words express a relation between other words in a "clause" while having categories of tense and mood and what not, and they're called verbs, maybe because of the latin legacy, but still not without a good reason - these words are different from the others syntacticly and morphologicly and when the words from other classes turn into verbs they adopt the features of the verbs they didn't ususally have.

Now, to make my example hypothetical language show my point better I'll change it a bit:

E: "how do you call this?"
A: "BOOKO"
E: "and this?"
A: "TABLA"

.... aha, those are nouns...

E: "what kind of BOOKO is this?"
A: "THICKSKI"
E: "and how do you say that it's a thick book?"
A: "THICKSKI BOOKO"

E: "what kind of TABLA is this?"
A: "WOODSKA"
E: "and how do you say that it's a wooden table?"
A: "WOODSKA TABLA"

ok, those are adjectives and it seems that nouns function as adjectives, let's check it:

E: "what material this TABLA is made of?"
A: "WOODSKI [MATERIALO]"

hmm... not clear, but ok, let's search for verbs.... (assuming we know quite some nouns already):

E: "what does this MANO do?"
A: "WORKSKI MANO"
E: "what did he do yesterday?"
A: "WORKSKI MANO YESTERDAYLY"
E: "what will he do tomorrow?"
A: "NOTKNOWSKI MIO WHAT MANSKI OCUPATIO TOMMOROWLY. WEEKENDA TOMMOROWLY."

Now the nouns end in -O or -A (the Ethnologist will probably distinguish two genders), adjectives in -SKI or -SKA (agreeing in gender with noun). The relationships that in english would be expressed with verb are expressed in these language with adjectives.

RUNSKI MANO - the/a man runs
SEESKI RUNSKI MANO MIO - I see a running man
SEESKI RUNSKI MANO MIO YESTERDAYLY - Yesterday I saw a running man

Does the fact that SEESKI expresses the relation between a subject and an object makes it a verb? Even though morphologically it looks just like the adjective WOODSKI?
.

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