Lulani
Posted: Wed Sep 10, 2014 2:19 am
IIRC, Middle Egyptian had only one inherent adjective: Nb "every, all". All others were just derived from nouns or verbs. Also, many languages (including my own pet conlang ) lack adjectives as a separate class of words: Most Australian languages lack a distinction between nouns and adjectives; apparently Calusa lacked a distinction between adverbs and adjectives, as did Ventureño - in these two languages, they are respectively known as "modifiers" and "adjuncts".Sakir wrote:Are there really only three adjectives in your language? The ones you've listed seem to be concerned with specifying a subset of a set (some, different, certain), so I might expect adjectival strategies for other divvying-up, like 'all but one', 'this one alone', and so on. Is there a motivation for this particular relationship being shown as noun suffixes? In your noun-phrase section, you say slot 'vii' can take an adjective: are these drawing from the same class? In which case, how would your language handle an open-ended array of Crayola colors? Perhaps you would import words like 'cyan', 'chartreuse', 'summer half-marigold', or whatever nonsense as some kind of noun, and attribute it to referants with a noun phrase? Or perhaps as verbs? Just some random thoughts - chapter 12 just seems remarkably terse!
Makes sense, and I kind of suspected that to be the case based on your examples. Perhaps the thing you are feeling sensitive to here isn't so much something called an 'adjective' as the kind of words associated with determiners and such in other languages. I guess this includes things like "the", "a", "this", "some" and all those, if my memory serves. Your dictionary has "first", "second/penultimate","some","every", "none" as adjectives, so perhaps one could analyze your language as having a rich set of determiners?Ryan of Tinellb wrote:There are more than three adjectives, but not many more. (I don't know how many, the dictionary is not finished yet.) The 'true' adjectives cannot be used predicatively, so my idea is that they are only for things that I feel could not really be derived from other parts of speech.
I grinned pretty broadly! AwesomeRyan of Tinellb wrote:As a thank-you for reading, if you look up "sakiri" (under "kiri") in the dictionary, it may (or may not) amuse you.