Finally..

Playing with language in my head again. I think I’ve finally gotten somewhere with a noun-based, sort of verb-less languge.

To explain, english has nouns, and verbs. Imagine a language with no real verbs. Condiser the short sentence: “Bob hits Jo.” Here “hit” is the verb, its the “action word” as we learned in English class. What do we do without verbs? How do we communicate action?

Here’s my idea. Maybe verbs really communicate “state of being”.

Lets rephrase the short sentence in a little more detail, and explain what it really means: “Bob is currently in the state of hitting Jo” or conversely, “Jo is in the state of being hit by Bob”.

We’re not just describing an action, we’re describing the state of the two of individuals.

So lets drop the specifics of state and make things painfully general and kind of weird, but bear with me for a moment: “Bob is in an aggressive state in respect to Jo in a receiving state.”

No jokes about how Bob is the pitcher and Jo is the catcher.

Now we have two subjects and a lot of words about their really vague interaction. The downside of this approach is that specifics can only be attained through idioms and/or excessive wordiness. I’m okay with this downside, its just an experiment.

So lets condense some of the words down, to get a feel for how you might “use” this language experiment: “aggroBob toJo”

So we have much the same general information, but we lack specificity. We don’t get the intensity of the action and it lacks an accustomed directness. But maybe thats all we need - in a hunter-gatherer sense - to get by. Intensity could be conveyed by word stress and body language for instance.

If you know much about language you might be saying “Well okay, but you’ve just dumbed down verbs, not gotten rid of them.” and if you don’t know much about language you’re probably saying “So what?”

To the latter, I’d say that language drives communication, the sharing of ideas, and influences how you communicate those ideas. Playing with language lets you look at things another way. To the former, there’s more, keep reading.

Lets go to a new example, since it’ll be easier for me to demonstrate: “The hawk dives at the mouse sitting in the grassy field.”

There’s quite a few qualifiers in this example, and its because I’m wrapping “state” to be a very general encompassing thing. That means we’re dropping adjectives too, and replacing them with stateful nouns. But I’ll get to that in a second.

We have the noun “hawk” assume that word in this imaginary language is similar, perhaps “hoko”. But in this language, there is no direct translation for “hawk” exactly, its more like “a hawk in its natural state”. This is very context dependent, especially from what little or a lot you may know about various breeds of hawk, but we will assume its differentiated from other states like “passive”, “aggressive”, “at rest”, “in its natural residence”, etc; so for the sake of argument I will say that its natural state is “in flight”. So “hoko” means a hawk in flight.

So if a noun inherently carries state with it, then we have many words meaning the same object, but in a different state. There are some real human languages that do something very similar, so its not that far fetched an idea.

I’m going to manipulate the word itself in such a way that it becomes a different word, refering to the same type of object, but in a different state, like so:

• hoko - hawk in flight (natural state)
• hocho - hawk in its nest (natural residence)
• hoto - hawk diving (aggro)
• hodo - hawk on branch (passive)
• hoku - hawk’s state is being affected (receives)

..and so on.

Then we’ll make up a word for the mouse to use, “mosu” and apply similar conversions to it:

• mosu - mouse scurrying (natural)
• mohu - mouse in its burrow (residence)
• mofu - mouse biting (aggro)
• movu - mouse sitting on the ground (passive)
• moso - mouse’s state is being affected (receives)

..and now field we will just call “filo” and assume a fields natural state is to be grassy. So now we should be able to construct some semblance of a sentence with just those stateful nouns:

“Hoto movu, filo.”

Meaning something like “Hawk dives at mouse, grassy field.”

I think in practice, to make the language useful root words like “hoko” would need to be longer to compensate for their depth of meaning, I’m thinking 4 syllables would be standard to allow for an overall pattern to remain the same while still being able to have many potential states, but without resorting to affixes - that is to say, adding things onto the begining or end or infixes - where you add syllables in the middle of words.

We could add some other states or connecting words, like something meaning “in the vicinity of” would be nice for this example. But again, there’s enough information to be able to assume from context alone.

I think its important to keep in mind that each of these states are context dependant. So if we change the context, suddenly the meaning could shift dramatically.

Say we defined a word for defining the state of the weather like “wetu” meaning “pleasant weather” or in context it could mean “the type of weather you expect”, whatever that is for your context. Take Chicago in Winter for instance - “pleasant” is probably not generally something you get from weather in Chicago during the winter. In that context “cold” is probably more appropriate. And we’ll also say that “wethu” is stormy weather, the aggro state of weather for your context. For Chicago in the winter, this could well be translated “blizzard”.

Now if we say “Wethu, hoko.” we would possibly translate this instance of “hoko” differently from the “hoko” in the previous example, since hawks tend to avoid flying around when its stormy if they can help it. So we could translate it as “Stormy weather, hawk in tree hiding from rain.” Since a much more natural state for a hawk in a storm might be taking refuge in a tree from the storm.

Now lets add “state modifiers”, they’re not really directly analogous to something in English, except maybe as a form of metaphor, but lets try it out. The state modifier I’m going to use is a “a” prefix to the word being used as the modifier. With that knowledge lets make a new sentence: “Wethu, mosu ahoko.” I would translate that into “Stormy weather, mouse in tree hiding from rain.” or more literally “Stormy weather, mouse hiding from rain, but in a tree like a hawk, rather than in its burrow.”

With that knowledge we can construct a lot more complex sentences using these rather simple constructs, building up context and an understanding in the receiver of your communication of the environment and what the actors in it are doing. So we haven’t avoided verbs altogether, but we’ve exchanged “action words” for “contextual state”, which I think is pretty cool.