Paradigm Paralysis In Linguistic Systems

[Robits R real! =O]

vampyre_smiles

I idea existence, exception presentation English difficulty existence. You understanding achievement?

idea is a verb in that sentence.
So is "understanding achievement".
They're just morphologically identical to nouns.
Further, your meaning was unclear.  

[Robits R real! =O]

WaffleBat

There is no way to escape the psycological idea of a word. In a language you need a way to refrence things. Unless we go to Body Language or Sign Language. It is really a constant stream, ended only when a point has been made clear, insted of breaking an idea into little "sentences".

Or, perhaps everything was refrenced only with a description of it (same "roundabout" idea as before).
Like, insted of "the boy bounced a ball" it could be "Young humanistic p***s-born, rappid directional, spherical."
Although, perhaps it is so insane you would need to talor a conlag to it. Perhaps an ideographical language of philophers? Perhaps, an abstract langauge used on for refrencing abstract concepts simply by listing other abstract concepts.

Sign languages have words.
SL have verbs, nouns, adpositions, adjectives, everything spoken languages have.  

[Cynthia_Rosenweiss]

Xeigrich

First off, it's fallacy to argue that anything Doesn't Exist. NOTHING can be proven to not exist, because you can't provide proof about something that simply isn't there. I can argue that Monkeybats don't exist, but what proof can I provide other than "Well, we haven't found one yet, so they don't exist."

That's an old - and unfortunately widely believed, epistemological chestnut.

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See if we can come up with truly unique concepts so far-fetched from the current concept of 'language' that a random college-level linguistics student would be bewildered by the very prospect.

That's a hard order to fill.

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I think the first step to breaking the paralysis is to abandon and forsake everything we know about languages.

I've heard of people trying to do this, but more to escape duality itself and rise to a state of transcendent consciousness, above the "Abyss" as Aleister Crowley might have put it. I haven't heard of anyone attempting this to reinvent the wheel so to speak.

And this is another task easier said than done.

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Imagine we are beings with no means of communication, and we must sit together and gesticulate madly until we get to a point where ideas are communicated effectively.

How'd these beings manage to survive all those years then? I seems you're positing a sort of "state of nature" with regard to linguistics as a hermeneutic fiction. I think the problem is a bit more complex than to be dealt with by a gedankenexperiment. If what you want is to be achieved, you're going to have to find a rigourous scientific methodology to do so. Otherwise what you've thought you've "abolished" is just going to march in through the back door.

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I believe that is the only universal concept in languages: that they are a means for communication or record-keeping.

In that case, the clay tokens preceding the invention of writing were bona fide, 100% language. I think you're casting your concept-formation net a little too wide here.

And what box are you exactly trying to get out of? The linguistic box, the semiotic box, or the ontological box?  

[Cynthia_Rosenweiss]

....And I also found last night, quite by accident the existence of a pictorial method of communication called Isotype. Maybe you can get inspiration from it?

http://www.fulltable.com/iso/index.htm  

[Layra-chan]

I've been continuing on with my attempts to get rid of word types. So far I've managed to make nouns and verbs roughly equivalent, in that a stem that can be declined into a noun can also be conjugated into a verb.
The more interesting structure is with regards to modifiers (adjectives and adverbs). These I turned into relative clauses, which makes sense for adjectives but not so much for adverbs being that we don't have relative verbs in most languages.

"The red dog" becomes "The-dog, which the-viewer sees-as-red".
"Go quickly" becomes "Go, which speed [noun indicating manner]".

In the noun example, the relative clause reads as "the viewer sees the dog as red". The relative clause in the verb example would then be "speed go [noun indicating manner]", which is complete nonsense in English but I'm sure you can figure out how it's supposed to work.

So, lexically, adjectives/adverbs can be built out of nouns and verbs, by which I mean nouns. This includes prepositional phrases, where the preposition is turned into either a noun or a verb as appropriate.

Similarly, things generally thought of as parts of the nouns or verbs can be attached as modifiers: plurality "which numbers plural", tense "which past [noun indicating time]", etc.

I've also managed to wrangle conjunctions into being made of nouns via a marker, so
"A and B" becomes "union[of] A B" where the [of] is an interpretation of the conjunction marker.

Now comes the question of what to do with other parts of speech. Having decided that determiners are adjectives, I'm not entirely sure what's left. Question markers can be treated as modifiers, as can exclamation markers. Interjections, maybe? But those are made of nouns and verbs anyway.

Again, this is all lexical, not syntactic. There is a marker that turns a verb-noun pair into an adjective and a marker (the same marker, actually) that turns a noun-noun pair into an adverb, and a marker that turns lexical stems into conjunctions. Although I firmly stand by the "everything not a noun or verb is a modifier" bit. Actually, what are usually called "verb phrases" would be modifiers in this paradigm, but since the base clause is treated like all the other clauses it still works out.  

[Sano Parmandil]

Layra-chan

I've been continuing on with my attempts to get rid of word types. So far I've managed to make nouns and verbs roughly equivalent, in that a stem that can be declined into a noun can also be conjugated into a verb.
The more interesting structure is with regards to modifiers (adjectives and adverbs). These I turned into relative clauses, which makes sense for adjectives but not so much for adverbs being that we don't have relative verbs in most languages.

"The red dog" becomes "The-dog, which the-viewer sees-as-red".
"Go quickly" becomes "Go, which speed [noun indicating manner]".

In the noun example, the relative clause reads as "the viewer sees the dog as red". The relative clause in the verb example would then be "speed go [noun indicating manner]", which is complete nonsense in English but I'm sure you can figure out how it's supposed to work.

So, lexically, adjectives/adverbs can be built out of nouns and verbs, by which I mean nouns. This includes prepositional phrases, where the preposition is turned into either a noun or a verb as appropriate.

Similarly, things generally thought of as parts of the nouns or verbs can be attached as modifiers: plurality "which numbers plural", tense "which past [noun indicating time]", etc.

I've also managed to wrangle conjunctions into being made of nouns via a marker, so
"A and B" becomes "union[of] A B" where the [of] is an interpretation of the conjunction marker.

Now comes the question of what to do with other parts of speech. Having decided that determiners are adjectives, I'm not entirely sure what's left. Question markers can be treated as modifiers, as can exclamation markers. Interjections, maybe? But those are made of nouns and verbs anyway.

Again, this is all lexical, not syntactic. There is a marker that turns a verb-noun pair into an adjective and a marker (the same marker, actually) that turns a noun-noun pair into an adverb, and a marker that turns lexical stems into conjunctions. Although I firmly stand by the "everything not a noun or verb is a modifier" bit. Actually, what are usually called "verb phrases" would be modifiers in this paradigm, but since the base clause is treated like all the other clauses it still works out.

Well, there is a simpler way, IMO, to get rid of adverbs and adjectives. For adjectives, you could simply turn them into verbs, as many natlangs do, like Japanese. So you could say "The dog 'reds'", with "reds" being a form of the verb "to be red".

For adverbs, the simplest way is to turn them into a noun + adposition. Latin used to do it, my own native language, Portuguese, is able to do it (although it's only used in somewhat formal contexts). "Ele correu com velocidade" means literally, "He ran with speed".

Or you could turn the adverbs into adjectives, which is what informal Portuguese (and, or so I've heard, German) does. So you would say "He ran quick". But then, as you want neither class in your conlang, this wouldn't be much of an option...

By the way, from your posts it seems to me that you are trying to make a loglang; although I wouldn't say it's impossible, as there are plenty of good loglangs out there, well, every concept expressed by language is, in a sense, arbitrarily defined. Since every natural language has its quirks and irregularities, one could say it is sort of "hard-wired" in the brain. Besides, those irregularities are what make language beautiful razz  

[Layra-chan]

The reason I use such a construction for adjectives and adverbs is that I can't treat nouns and verbs differently, and I'm trying to reduce everything to a single structure.
Including adpositions would require increasing the basic lexicon, and turning adjectives/adverbs into single verbs or nouns would require a break from the subject-object-verb symmetry that I've imposed (but didn't mention as it isn't that interesting). As it is, I'm basically using the second noun in place of the adposition.
Also, the way I've done it allows for a much larger semantic space than the standard adjective construction. For example, it would be easy to mark the set of observers for whom the dog is red and the set of observers for whom the dog is not red, giving me both qualia and relativity. Since omission of frame-of-reference is one of my pet peeves, I don't think I'll be letting this go.

I'm not really a fan of the irregularities, to be honest. I'd be a Chomskian prescriptivist if it weren't an entirely untenable position with regards to natlangs.

And I'd argue with you regarding the hardwiring of quirks and irregularities. I'm convinced that the irregularities that occur in natlangs are due to information-theoretic optimizations and transmission errors built up over the course of time. For example, the more-often used verbs tend to be the ones that conjugate irregularly, indicating that they are being made irregular through use, not a priori. Also, the tendency for children to over-regularize indicates that it is in fact regularization that is the intrinsic mode of operation; hence the irregularities must be being imposed from the outside.
Since this language isn't intended to be used, I don't see any particular reason to build in the irregularities that would only build up through wear and tear and prescriptivist snobbery.