Lots of languages have really difficult idiosyncrasies. Take Cherokee, for example, a language that is 75% verb.
Well...kind of. It's actually a good deal more complicated than that, so I'm going to elaborate.
I don't know much about Cherokee, but I did write a paper on Choctaw syntax, and my professor, who has worked on both, says Cherokee works in more or less the same way. In European languages, you have nouns, and you have verbs. Verbs act as
predicates, and nouns act as
arguments, basically. And you can tell by looking at a word whether it's a noun or a verb. If it's a noun, it'll act like an argument. If it's a verb, it'll act like a predicate. Nouns have noun inflections. Verbs have verb inflection. To turn a noun into a verb or vice versa, you need to use
derivational morphology, which creates an entirely new word.
So, if you have the Latin verb
amō "I love", you can't just decide "oh, this is a third-declension o-stem noun like
contiō" and put an accusative suffix on it to get
*amōnem. That's just crazy. Nor can you take a noun and put a passive ending on it. In Latin trying to do that would be insane. You
can make a noun out of a verb...but you need a
derivational affix. E.g., you can put
-or onto
amō and get
amor "love", and
that's a noun- but not without turning the verb into an entirely new word. Even English has words like "love" that can act like a noun or a verb, but the inflectional morphology (or what's left of it) always distinguishes. "Loved" cannot be the past tense of the noun "love"- nouns by definition cannot have past tense.
This is so central to the way Indo-European languages work that it almost never occurs to anyone to question it. But Choctaw does something entirely different and really fucking cool. Allow me to explain.
You get a data set (this was how my paper worked, by the way) that contains the word
basha, which is glossed "is cut". You also get a word
bash-li "he cuts it".
OK, cool, you think, you put
-li onto a verb and it becomes transitive. It's a transitive marker for verbs. We've got this.
We also have
isht-bash-li, which is glossed "he cuts with (something)". The
isht- here acts like what we call an
applicative. Think about how a passive works:
a) The man killed the groundhog.
b) The groundhog was killed.
In a passive, you take a normally transitive verb and kick the subject out. Then you
promote the object to subject position and make the verb passive. An
applicative does something sort of similar- it takes an oblique argument, like an instrument, or a location, or an indirect object, or whatever- kicks out the old direct object and promotes that oblique argument to direct object role. So
isht- promotes an instrument to object position- if you started with
he cut the meat with a knife, you get rid of the meat and now get a transitive verb that is basically
he with-cut the knife or, more naturally,
he cut (something) with the knife.
We can wrap our heads around this. But wait, there's more. Because I didn't actually give you a
definition when I wrote "he cuts it" for
bash-li or "he cuts with it" when I wrote
isht-bash-li, I gave you a
gloss. You could just as easily gloss
bash-li as "butcher". Or
isht-bash-li as "knife", actually.
What's going on is that Choctaw's affixes, its prefixes and suffixes, are all about a
semantic meaning, not so much grammatical function. There's no distinction between inflection and derivation, and there's no distinction between noun and verb affixes- an affix goes on whatever it wants. Instead, you have very strict syntax that tells you where the arguments are and where the predicate is. It's basically subject-object-(obliques)-verb order, and this is always followed- you can't just use a case system to scramble everything around.
In other words, if your word is in an argument place in the sentence, it acts like a "noun" and all its affixes are nouny. And if it's in a predicate place in the sentence, it acts like a "verb" and all its affixes are verbs. So there's a very clear distinction between arguments and predicates, between words doing noun things and words doing verb things, just as in European languages. But the inflectional morphology doesn't do that. The syntax does- you have lots of inflection, but very strict syntax!
This actually gets extended to just about every affix in the language. For example, Choctaw unsurprisingly has a suffix that on predicates means "past tense". But if you take the word for "wife", and put a past tense marker on her, she's now your ex-wife. Or you can take the subject agreement markers on predicates and also use them for possession. It's somewhat as if you could say "perr-amos" in Spanish and mean "our dog," or "espos-é" to mean "my ex-husband."
I hasten to add that this is nowhere
near the weirdest thing you find in the languages of North America...
(OK, I lied- there are a few true nouns in Choctaw that can only take a few pieces of verby inflection, so there
is a distinction of a sort. An example is
waak, "cow". However, they're a small, closed class, and usually consist of really basic so-called "semantic primes", things like "tree" or "water" or "moon", or they're borrowed-
waak is from Spanish
vaca. Almost all nouns of any nuance, including people's names and new coinages, exist in the sort of noun-verb limbo I've outlined above.)
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