Information / nouns vs. verbs

[Pamela Munro]

The verbiness of certain American Indian languages is a topic I've long
thought about -- it's absolutely true that in some languages there
simply are more verbs than in others.

However, I would like to know the evidence that Lakhota thípi is still a
verb in all uses (of course it can certainly be a main verb expressing
'they live'). (Translation is not evidence, of course. Certainly many
concepts both concrete and (especially) abstract that are nouns in
familiar European languages are expressed with verbs in languages like
Lakhota.)

However, unless I am mistaken there are certainly a few (!) tests for
nominal vs. verbal status in Lakhota. One of these, I'd say, would be
occurrence with the possessive prefixes tha- etc. Of course not all
things that (I'd say) were nouns do occur with these, but my belief is
that anything that does occur with them is (in that usage) not a verb.
And thathípi is the possessed form of 'house' that I've recorded.

Pam