Nouns and verbs

[Heike Bödeker]

Dear Michael,

> Blair Rudes, the late Iroquoianist, once told me that there was a 
> Iroquoian language (Tuscarora, I believe, but I can't remember)
> that had only around 7 bona fide nouns; everything else that we
> would consider nouns were actually verbs.

Oh really? That would be highly interesting!!

As far as I can remember the idea of a noun-verb indistinction in 
Northern Iroquoian first was put forth by Hans-Jürgen Sasse more than 
20 years ago (Der irokesische Sprachtyp. *Zeitschrift für 
Sprachwissenschaft* 7/2, 1988: 173-213), mainly using data from 
Cayuga -- to at least then not be very well received by 
Iroquoianists, basically for similar reasons already mentioned for 
Nahuatl. Although things in Iroquoian may be a little bit more 
complicated, e.g. as there are quite a few ideophones (though also 
surely more than just 7), e.g. Cayuga /taku:s/ "cat" and /kwiskwis/ 
"pig", some of which also may take some inflectional morphology, e.g. 
Oneida /o-hkwalí/ "bear" bearing a feminine-zoic pronominal index.

Regarding Tuscarora, both Rudes and Mithun AFAIK used to be very 
clear about recognizing a noun-verb distinction. Please keep me 
posted if you found out someone of them having changed their mind.

As for omnipredicativity, the mere fact that nouns at times may 
function predicatively does in no way imply that they always 
necessarily did so, see cases like Russian <èto - most> "this is a 
bridge", where predicativity is established by mere juxtaposition. 
Not even involving verbal morphology! (Of which Russian would have 
quite a bit, and also possibilities of denominal verb formation. So 
*if* it hade been required it would have been available. But it 
wasn't.)

As for the Baraga quote, I assume this probably refers to "sentence 
words", as Ojibwa, like any other Algic lg., as Sasse would have put 
it then, does have a noun-verb distinction on all levels relevant 
(lexical, morphological, syntactic).

All the best,

Heike
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