Re: Languages without verbs

Hi!

Fredrik Ekman writes:
>...
> I suppose that verbless (sort of) conlangs have been attempted before, and
> I would like to hear some ideas of potential weaknesses and difficulties
> with such an approach.
>...
If verbs are simply replaced by suffixes, i.e., the word status
changed to affix status, then I'd be tempted to call those affixes
verbs anyway and simply say that verbs are affixes, not words on their
own.  Sounds like a polysynthetic language rather than one with no
verbs.  Depends on how many such suffixes you're going to have and on
whether it's an open class and on whether such affixes are special
from others and on where the classic tense, aspect, mood, person
categories are expressed.

A common thing is to remove *most* verbs, often leaving only one verb.
Japanese is famous for borrowing verbs as nouns and using 'suru' (to
do) to make it a verb in Japanese.  And Basque, IIRC, only has very
few verbs, in the order of five.

My conlangs Qþyn|gài and Tyl Sjok have no distinction between nouns,
verbs, and adjectives.  Both only have one open lexical class (the
closed classes usually being particles etc.).  These two languages
conflate the classes in such an abstract way that it is hard to say
whether that class corresponds to nouns or verbs -- it is a different
type of class, really, which may be used in both nominal and verbal
context.

My first conlang, Fukhian, which I constructed before I found this
list, i.e., in isolation and separated from all the knowledge and
ideas, has no distinction between nouns and verbs.  I fancy that, it
seems.  (But it does have adjectives as a later analysis revealed.)

Fukhian is a language that quite clearly has no verbs but does have
nouns: it adds case and number endings to all the nouns in the
sentence.  Additional to that, verbal endings like tense, aspect,
mood, are attached to the first noun in the sentence, which, if not
carrying any other endings, looks pretty much like a normal verb if
you don't analyse too deeply.  If you do (e.g. when switching the
order of nouns in the sentence (Fukhian has free word order)), it's
revealed that it is just a normal noun without endings, carrying all
the verbal endings that could be attached to any other noun as well,
with or without nominal endings.  (If a Fukhian phrase contains no
noun at all, then a simple /t-/ is used to carry the verbal endings.
You could call /t-/ the single verb in the language.  A clean way to
reducing the count to zero would be to require the use of a noun (or
pronoun).)

Fukhian feels like quite a conventional conlang to me, so I don't
think there are any problems constructing a verbless language.

**Henrik

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