Unusual morphological phenomena

[rawonam]

I was astonished by the fact that Korean does not distinguish between traditional adjectives and verbs. It's the same category and any adjectival meaning is expressed formally by a verb, as if one would say "to good" (that is, I good/he goods, though there is no conjugation by person). Even any denominative construction would be something like "traditioning clothes".

Do you know other such interesting facts from different languages?

[Kristina]

http://www.erlang.com.ru/euskara/?linguistics-stadial contains any information about it (especially points 2.2 and 2.7)

[iopq]

(10-28-2009 09:59 PM)rawonam Wrote:  I was astonished by the fact that Korean does not distinguish between traditional adjectives and verbs. It's the same category and any adjectival meaning is expressed formally by a verb, as if one would say "to good" (that is, I good/he goods, though there is no conjugation by person). Even any denominative construction would be something like "traditioning clothes".

Do you know other such interesting facts from different languages?

same thing in Japanese
you say I good-be, he good-be, etc.

that's more of a grammatical phenomenon

[autolyk]

(10-28-2009 09:59 PM)rawonam Wrote:  I was astonished by the fact that Korean does not distinguish between traditional adjectives and verbs.
Do you know other such interesting facts from different languages?

The same word can be a noun or a verb in the Ural languages though it is not too frequent.
In Hungarian this realizes by means of affixes (fagyban "in a frost", fagynánk "we would freeze") or with context (a tavaszi fagy nagy károkat okozott "the spring frost has put heavy losses", a föld csonttá fagy "the earth freezes through").
In Mordvin (Erza) nouns (adjectives, numerals) can attach verb affixes being a predicate (loman’ "a man", loman’an "I am a man", loman’at "you are a man", od "young", odan "I am young", odol’in’ "I was young")
Many researchers consider such phenomena as reflexion of Uralic parent language feature. As indirect acknowledgement are the etymologies being verbs or nouns in different languages (fin pala "a bit" - hung fal "to swallow")