Re: Some Thoughts on Word Classes
Saul Epstein 
Fri, 21 Aug 1998 15:49:12 -0500

Quotes from: Rob Zook <lalaith*unicom,net>
Date: Thursday, August 20, 1998 10:12 PM

> At 08:06 PM 8/20/98 -0500, Saul Epstein wrote:
> >So here's another possible set of classes...
> >
> >    1. Action
> >    2. Entity
> >    3. Deixis
> >    4. Quality (or State)
> >    5. Quantity
> >    6. Operation
> 
> Hmmm, I was actually thinking that we could better roll
> state into relations, maybe we should discuss this a little more :)

Of course.

Let's discard "relation" for the moment, because it fails to really
say what needed saying, and go back to the ZC...

We have actions, such as to stop, to walk, to kill, to eat, to live,
and to die. We have states, such as existant, dead, and alive. We
have entities. We have qualifiers, such as red and quickly.

In the ZC, actions and states are classed together. This makes an
intuitive kind of sense, I think, because English (like many other
languages) uses a verb construction to form a sentence to express a
state. ("The captain *is* dead.") But if a sentence refers to an
entity's state in the process of expressing something else, this verb
construction is not used. ("I mourn the dead captain.")

This exactly matches the way entity-qualifiers are used. ("His blood
*is* red." / "The sand drinks his red blood, just as it would a
Vulcan's.") So my suggestion is that saying "a state of deadness
characterizes the captain" is structurally very similar to saying "a
quality of redness characterizes his blood." Our words like "dead"
suggest a similarity to actions, I think, because they are derived
from verbs; whereas our words like "red" aren't (at least, not
obviously).

So, I think, one could say <mata keptan> to mean "the captain is
dead;" and <th'laktra mata keptanhi> to mean "I mourn the dead
captain." (Or, to make the captain the subject, <ewl'hont
entarpryz'hi mata keptan>, "the dead captain haunts _Enterprise_.")

Is that any clearer? Or did I miss what you wanted to discuss? ;-)

--
from Saul Epstein
locus*planetkc,com - www,planetkc,com/locus
"Surakri' ow'phahcur the's'hi the's'cha'; the's'phahrka
     the's'hi surakecha'."
                                        -- K'dvarin Urswhl'at