Skip to main content

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

Required fields*

5
  • 5
    There many languages for which the European classification of words into parts of speech simply doesn't apply. Such languages have neither nouns nor verbs. Note, to answer you question we need to know what you mean by "nouns", "verbs", etc. If "verbs" are words that can be altered for person and tense, then all Turkish nouns are "verbs", they can be conjugated for tense and person. The Wolof personal pronouns will be "verbs" too, because in Wolof there's maa ngi 'I that is now', naa 'I that was', dinaa 'I that will be', and so on for every person. Commented May 5, 2017 at 17:46
  • @Quidam: I've up-voted your (unintentional?) auto-antonym (as downvoting, except in extreme cases, isn't sporting). Commented May 13, 2017 at 12:04
  • English has no verbs except to be. Commented Dec 27, 2021 at 5:45
  • How about music? Music might be considered a language without nouns and/or verbs, but it is difficult to say what a piece of music means, or if it even has meaning, and it's particularly difficult to translate whatever the meaning is into say, english without "losing a lot in the translation." Commented Oct 10, 2023 at 21:48
  • I just saw this link; academic.oup.com/book/26032/chapter-abstract/… Commented May 13, 2024 at 10:54