Received: by 10.68.125.233 with SMTP id mt9mr8527344pbb.5.1334013184296;
        Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:13:04 -0700 (PDT)
Path: r9ni38160pbh.0!nntp.google.com!news2.google.com!postnews.google.com!glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail
From: DKleinecke <dkleine...@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Verbs and Nouns
Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2012 15:44:35 -0700 (PDT)
Organization: http://groups.google.com
Lines: 26
Message-ID: <6696894.195.1334011475756.JavaMail.geo-discussion-forums@pbcr5>
References: <12080790.1383.1333931410504.JavaMail.geo-discussion-forums@pbgg10>
 <b1d38a34-1b17-4ce2-b3c4-638ab9f85630@l7g2000vbw.googlegroups.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: 69.42.3.177
Mime-Version: 1.0
X-Trace: posting.google.com 1334013184 25815 127.0.0.1 (9 Apr 2012 23:13:04 GMT)
X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com
NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2012 23:13:04 +0000 (UTC)
In-Reply-To: <b1d38a34-1b17-4ce2-b3c4-638ab9f85630@l7g2000vbw.googlegroups.com>
Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com
Injection-Info: glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com; posting-host=69.42.3.177; posting-account=7Xc2EwkAAABXMcQfERYamr3b-64IkBws
User-Agent: G2/1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

On Sunday, April 8, 2012 9:03:58 PM UTC-7, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> On Apr 8, 8:30=A0pm, DKleinecke <dkleine...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > There are languages in which utterances are mostly verbs. =A0There are =
nouns, of course, but they are few and far between.
> >
> > I am curious to what extent there are languages in which utterances are=
 mostly nouns. There are verbs, of course, but they are few and far between=
.
> >
> > The most noun-heavy texts I have ever examined are English (American to=
 be precise) engineering magazines. =A0Not only are they filled with nouns =
but what verbs do appear are generic and bland. Almost nothing is communica=
ted via verbs.
> >
> > Are there any useful statistics in the literature? =A0Most corpus studi=
es are not focused enough. How about other languages than English?
>=20
> The "Basic English" experiment had ca. 18 verbs and close to 800 nouns
> (850 words total).

My question was intended to apply in the corpus sense. That's why I said ut=
terance. It's been a long time since I looked at Basic English but as I rem=
ember it indeed had bland generic verbs and the nouns carried most of the c=
ommunication load.=20

But is it fair to consider Basic English a language ?