Re: languages without verbs?

Nathan Sanders wrote: 
In article <42f12838$0$714$5fc3050@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
 Artem Baguinski <artm@xxxxx> wrote:


Would a scientist call this class verbs and comment "they use verbs to express what we need adjectives for", or would he call them adjectives (and invert the phrase)?


The former, most likely, especially if the words in question combine with tense and aspect markers.


In my example it sounded:

WORKSKI MANO YESTERDAYLY.

here tense is shown by the adjective YESTERDAYLY. Is this a tense marker combined with the verb WORKSKI?


Or would the phrase in quotes be non-scientific, since the exact meaning of the terms "verb"/"adjective" is language dependent?


If you stick to a formal, rather than functional, definition, then it would necessarily be language-dependent (since form varies from language to langauge: different morphemes, different word order, different subcategorizations), but it would still be scientific (by which I assume you mean rigorous). 

yes, i meant that.

But my main question was: are there any real languages where something like that happens?


Yes. For example, in Ojibwe and many other languages, (almost all of) the words we think of as "adjectives" in English behave morphosyntactically like verbs, showing the same markers for subject agreement, tense, aspect, etc. As I understand it, a sentence such as "I saw a red ball" would come out as "I saw a ball, and it reds", "I saw a redding ball", or something similar. 

Thanks.
.

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