Since everyone speaks about the kingdom of Nouns, I'd like to point my readers to that short story by Borges, Tlôn, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which describes a kingdom of verbs.
Here's an excerpt:There are no nouns in Tlön's conjectural Ursprache, from which the "present" languages and the dialects are derived: there are impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) with an adverbial value. For example: there is no word corresponding to the word "moon,", but there is a verb which in English would be "to moon" or "to moonate." "The moon rose above the river" is hlor u fang axaxaxas mlo, or literally: "upward behind the onstreaming it mooned."
"upward behind the onstreaming it mooned."
"It" is a (pro)noun. For that matter, I think "onstreaming" is too?
Re:faux verbification?
Sidhekin on 2006-08-05T12:58:40
Yeah, "onstreaming" is a noun. A gerund, to be specific. The article, "the", kinda gives it away.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think prepositions ("behind") require a noun phrase in English. But perhaps we can do this with two statements and adverbs instead of prepositions?
"streamed on ahead; mooned upward behind"
Or perhaps this is just plain silly.
:-P Re:faux verbification?
Aristotle on 2006-08-05T15:18:54
I think the point is that you just can’t really translate it to English without completely mangling it?
