This reminded me the superb short story “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” by Jorge Luis Borges:
> 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."
In my work on grammatically sophisticated natural language parsing, I thought about this pattern extensively.
The basic observation is true: English allows you to stack nouns on top of one another, apparently without limit.
However, you're not really allowed to do this in any way you please. The almost-required interpretation is type specification: when you refer to N1 N2, you almost always means an N2 of type N1. So a "police officer" is an officer of type "police". An "oak tree" is a tree of type "oak".
I disagree with the grammaticality of some of the author's examples, and also some of his claims about the flexibility of the pattern. The type specification is almost always singular, and I've never seen punctuation included in the pattern. So "thrones game" should really be "throne game", and "night darkness, storminess" is not grammatical to me.
Interestingly, other languages do not permit this pattern, and so objects that can be expressed succinctly using the pattern in English become unwieldy in translation. In subways you sometimes a sign for "Passenger Emergency Intercom System" which is translated as something like "Sistema de comunicación para pasajeros en caso de emergencia" in Spanish.
Agreed, the authors personal ability to make the phrases was not quite right.
They also confuse the ability to have these attacked nouns, with the idea that they are equivalent to other sentences in meaning. I think it becomes clear things like
It was a dark and stormy night
Night darkness, storminess
Loses the context of what or when was dark and stormy.
Why isn't the police office a police of type officer? When he gets promoted to police seargant or police commissioner, he changes what type of police he is.
Because adjectives come before nouns. The first word is almost always is a descriptor of the second word. A "pig flier" is clearly something that flies pigs, not a type of pig that flies.
A police of type officer would be an officer police, though just like a riot police isn’t a riot, but rather works with riots, an officer police wouldn’t necessarily be an officer.
The bag-of-nouns headline is a particular staple of regional British journalism. While bags of nouns are frequently used in both local and national headlines to describe the subjects of stories - CAR PARK PLUNGE DEATH VICAR is a succinct way of clarifying, our of all the death vicars, which death vicar this particular story relates to - but it tends to fall to local news to report on the various events which befall each death vicar - the APOLOGY, the ENQUIRY, the TRIBUTES, the COURT APPEARANCE, etc. as the story runs its course. National news tends only to run such stories when there is action, or closure, or a comment from a celebrity - CAR PARK PLUNGE DEATH VICAR FINALLY CAPTURED, or JUSTICE FOR CAR PARK PLUNGE DEATH VICAR, or CAR PARK PLUNGE DEATH VICAR ‘MISUNDERSTOOD’ CLAIMS BIG BROTHER CONTESTANT.
As a result they tend to resort to the occasional verb or adjective, while local press sticks to just the nouns.
On the other hand, US journalism tends to use prepositional phrases for their identifying markers - PRIEST IN PARKING LOT DEATH - which leads to ‘crash blossoms’ when they put verbs on the end: PRIEST IN PARKING LOT DEATH PROTESTS.
(Careful - Dublin is very much not 'British'. Although that headline is from the Metro, which probably shares editorial content with British regional editions of the same paper, so... yes, an example of the same cultural phenomenon.)
I'm absolutely sure that pollination of the Irish culture by the British is inevitable, unless the Irish refuse to permit anything British to cross the border.
Reading this reminds of some of the crazy Sovereign Citizen and redemptionist movement ideas about "Correct Language" or "Quantum Language". For some reason they believe that by eschewing verbs and using punctuation creatively, they can somehow compel the state to excuse them from taxes, debt, the need for a driving license etc etc.
It's sort of a semantic magical thinking and I find it fascinating.
> FOR THE COURT OF THE WRITTEN-MOTION IS WITH THE FICTION BY THE MODIFICATION OF THE WRITTEN-WORD. FOR THE AFFIRMATION(OUTSIDE OF THE NOW-TIME-QUANTUM) OF THE PERJURY(FICTION OF THE LANGUAGE-CLAIMS) OF THIS PARLIAMENTARY(KINGS)-MOTION-PLEADINGS AGAINST THE PARTY.
Welp ... that's what happens when you think verbs are a conspiracy and try to base a legal theory on it.
To me the most bizarre aspect is the central one - you think that the government is a conspiracy, that sometime in the past, more than a century ago, the whole thing was usurped by this massive conspiracy who are systematically keeping down the common man, and controlling everything.
And you think if you say the magic combination of word-salad they're going to be forced somehow to stop it and recognise you? Like "Uh, yeah, this guy knows the magic words, guess we don't get to oppress him now, you're free to go sir" instead of "What? we took over the whole government, back in your box, slave"
Because that totally makes sense.
--edit-- Oh wow, yeah that word salad page really does look like this stuff!
Afaik “quantum language” is a term for legitimate, and still ongoing, attempts at finding the semantic core of human languages. Possibly not ‘the’ accepted term, but used in some papers.
Another baffling invention is the current trend towards verbs as nouns, unchanged. Namely, ‘compute’ and something else technicky.
You know, I think I'm gonna leave the browse for a while, sit in the eat-prepare and make me some eat to relaxed sound-play. To avoid my blood press go too high. Maybe take a walk on the walk or even down to the green-grow.
I guess people felt about the same way when nouns were taking off as verbs and adjectives. Anyway, soon all the parts of speech will change places and everything will be fine again.
Adjective rather than verb, but that's how I feel about Apple's use of "Recents" as a menu entry in some of their software.
Developers, if your application ever offers me a selection of Recents, I will delete it and then delete it, and delete it, again and again until the computer steps in to stop me.
I like to think that this is what provoked Jony Ive into leaving.
I don't have trypophobia, but I imagine it's similar to the cringy sensation I get when I hear phrases like "hit me in the feels", and "he's good people".
One of the characters invents 'Unit Headline Language' (UHL) with constructs like 'Strike Threat Probe Row'. A key feature of the language is that you can arrange the units in many different ways and it makes as much - indeed as little - sense.
"UHL, Goldwasser quickly realised, was an ideal answer to the problem of making a story run from day to day in an automated paper. Say, for example, that the randomiser turned up
* STRIKE THREAT
By adding one unit at random to the formula each day the story could go:
Maybe unrelated, but reminds be Alexander Block[1]:
Night, streets, the lantern, the drugstore,
The meaningless and dusky light.
A quarter of the century more --
All fall the same into your sight!
You died – as it was before –
You have the former way to start:
The streets, the lantern, the drugstore,
Swell of the canal in the night.
The first and the last sentencies have no verbs at all.
I was under the impression that Americans pronounced Berkeley to rhyme with berk, rather than bark? But then Berkeley Barb would suggest the latter pronunciation?
Your impression is correct. There's also an interest for anything sharing the same first letter as meaningful. Which is why that Berkeley Barbs thing makes sense. Even willing to substitute so long as the phonetics are there (ie Kids Korner)
> 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."
You can read the original for free here: https://ciudadseva.com/texto/tlon-uqbar-orbis-
And in english here: http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/0066/borges.pdf
Highly recommended. 17 pages.