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sO, you mean something like communicating thgouht gamma rays?

Sorry, I can't type. It's imdnight and too dark to see.

But that's just it, Vren AREN'T a hive mind; they are about as opposite to that as you can get. Just because they don't break a specific paradigm doesn't mean they don't break a paradigm.

If the beings were a hive mind, they wouldn't need to communicate with each other using language, because they would already know what everyone else is thinking. Though they could use pherimones, energy, etc. to communicate. But the only thing they would need some other form of communication that isn't intrinsic to them would be speaking to something that isn't a hive.

My other lang I'm working on, Etrean (look for the God Lang thread I made), they started off as a "hive" with no identity to themselves, and didn't understand the idea until they ran into the Vren. Now they are a psudo-hive, but require a form of communication. If you'd like to help me make the language, then check out the thread and comment.

As someone else stated, if the paradigm is too different, we won't be able to understand it, and so assuming a language with that paradigm is useless to those of us who like to make our crazy ideas real. When I made the Vren and Etre, I knew this already, and since I'm writing a book, I need to understand them somewhat to write about them, or translate something into their languages. So, they are intrinsically different from humans, or even mortals in general, but not so out there that they and us could not interact on a meaningful basis.

I agree. Although, it has been argued that rather than thought shaping language, the structure and categories of language shape thought.

Maybe we can imagine a language that reverses the roles of verbs and nouns in terms of what they categorise, but it would indeed be very unusual to find a language that, instead of saying 'that is a cake', says 'that cakes a being'. And of course, even if language does shape thought to an extent, this will be limited by the limitations of thought.

Jeez, every time I read ya'll's posts, I mentally headdesk and wonder how the heck I'm ever going to make an actually good conlang. xd (And yes, I know "ya'll's" isn't a word.) I was thinking of something like this a day or so ago, but I never really sat down and gave some serious thought to it. This has probably been said before, since the recent posts in this thread are TL;DR to me, but I believe the major issue here is thinking that nouns and verbs are necessary to express complex messages...

Okay, so we have Object, Action, and Quality...

Hmm...uh...maybe we can...uh...

*headdesk* Never mind. xd From what I can gather, language kind of works by tagging an action word/phrase/whatever to an object. "X performs Y". I think that's the exact paradigm to break. A language that did not imply action with words...Oh, wait, there are those languages without verbs. >.< *is still trying to figure all this out*

EDIT: I think I have an idea. In languages without verbs or nouns, the missing element is expressed in a roundabout way with the other two, right? Perhaps we can eliminate all three and try to come up with a roundabout explanation of an action, and object, and a quality.

Why do you say that these nouns would become verbs and vice-versa? What would make their role switched? It seems to me that you're currently so inside the box that you think you've escaped it; like escaping prison to go to solitary confinement.

....

"What if nouns were verbs, and verbs were nouns!" Then you'd have verbs, which work like verbs, but they're called nouns. And vice versa. That's just deceptive, it's not anything new.


I like the idea of just having "words" and nothing specific like nouns or adjectives, but that's still "thinking in the box" because we're confined to words and sentences. Some languages like Chinese and English have very vague parts of speech with words that can be used in a variety of parts with no change to the word itself.

Adjectives can be used as nouns, nouns can be used as verbs, and verbs can be used as adjectives... But that's still so inside-the-box.


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(off topic)

I tried making a conlang once where every word was a "nounlike" by default. I had sentences like "I existance happiness" instead of "I am happy." It was neat, but it was really hard trying to form nounlikes for some concepts, especially abstract ones. I might try this again some day.

The problem with a completely "nounlike" language is that the words can still be categorized, it's just that we have a boatload of homonyms. If we don't have a boatload of homonyms, then the grammar is basically nonexistent, or completely isolating.

Consider the sentence "I speed movement". Exactly how do we analyze this? "I run"? "I who am fast move"? "My speed changes"? "I hasten movement"?
As soon as we place a marker on the word that is the verb, we get a verb and not a noun. As soon as we state what speed does verbally, we determine exactly what standard category the word falls into.

Even "I existence happiness" is a difficult statement, because you need to ask if it is "I am happy" or "I am happiness". If you separate the two words so that you get "happiness" and "one that is happy" then you might as well just make the second an adjective again.

@ Layra-chan

What do homonyms have to do with nounlike-only language? That's a topic if phonetics, which has nothing to do with the grammar and parts of speech.

Maybe you meant that a nounlike-only language would lack synonyms? It really just depends on how many nounlike (or whateverlike) roots you have. Your roots are the meaningful bits, and can have any variety of meanings, simple, or complex. One root might mean "happiness" and another root might mean "that which is filled with joy due to a fortuitous circumstance."

With a language like this, you would need particles, affixes, or static word order. Thus saying "Self speed movement" could mean "I quickly move." Saying "Self speed-walk direction store" could mean "I run to the store." And "Self past speed-walk direction store purchase milk inclusion soda." could mean "I ran to the store to buy milk and soda." That part isn't really the problem, because you can say "if you do it this way, that's what it means." Where the problem really comes up is how to make our thought processes adapt to thinking of every concept as inherently a THING rather than a descriptive quality or do-able action. It gets even harder when you try to completely take away the inherent (default?) part of speech of words. Not all of our familiar concepts can easily and intuitively be converted on a whim to whatever part of speech you choose.

We simulate this in English by tacking on extra suffixes.
Some of them are legitimate words...
Happy -> Happiness (Joy)
Sad -> Sadly

And some are ad-hoc and made up on the fly...
"I've just been computering all night long."

The problem in this area is the interpretation of the ad-hoc words. Computering could mean "making computers" or "using computers" or "being computers" or any other number of interpretation. And I'm not gonna sit down and declare one meaning for each possible part of speech for each root in the conlang. *dies*

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On the 'nounlikes' topic, I did make a perfectly usable conlang where every word was an abstract root. You had to specify the word's part of speech in each word, though, using prefixes and suffixes. It ended up working something like this...

The little boy is happy.
boy(noun) diminutivity(adj) condition(verb) joy(adj)

Although in the actual conlang, this sentence structure isn't used, and it would be more like "happy boy little" because preceding adjectives indicate a sort of copula situation. Adjectives normally occur after the nouns. Also, the example doesn't include the Function marker or the fourth marker that can have any number of functions. I said it was perfectly usable, not practical.

The hard part was figuring out how to describe each root, and how each root would be have when used as a different part of speech. If you take "happiness" and make it a verb, does it mean "to be happy" or "to make happy"? It was too confusing, and I couldn't ever decide on one way to do things.

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The thought that it's impossible to break free from our current psychological attachment to words is just another sign that we are definitely stuck in a linguistic paradigm paralysis. Just like "There's no way the world could be any other shape than flat! It just wouldn't work!"

We're stuck thinking in "meaningful units" even if they aren't exactly words. Maybe this is indeed the basis of language.

I'm wondering if maybe... Language is purely a human concept. That doesn't sound too strange, since we've yet to prove that a non-human can learn language. Even animals that are super-intelligent -- like dolphins and such -- don't appear to use language as we know it. They communicate, yes, but they don't use true language.

So maybe aliens or whoever wouldn't even use language. They would just communicate ideas, emotions, and whatnot. This idea might make the concept of "what kind of language do the aliens speak?" as irrelevant as asking "What kind of microprocessor does your bathtub use?"