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In Esperanto all common nouns contain the suffix -o (it can sometimes be elided in poetry, though), all adjectives contain the suffix -a and adverbs generally contain the suffix -e (though some end in -aŭ or -∅).

My question is: are there any natlangs where all or almost all members of a given lexical category contain a certain specific morpheme all the time? Do auxlangs have any natlang precedents in their explicit marking of whole parts of speech?

I think that something like Esperanto is unheard of. The only possible thing I can think of(and this information may be inaccurate), is Yoruba, where apparently nouns have the pattern of VCVC and verbs have the pattern of CVCV.

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"Wait for the starvation of glaciers, chicken hamburger Noel Weber Arthur."

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In Russian all (full) adjectives end with either -ий/-ый /ij/ɨj/ or -ой /oj/. In Hebrew all infinitives start with -ל /l/.
Other than this, everything else is pretty random.

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UNUS•ET•UNICUS

Only in the nominative sg masculine, though. It would count if they did in both numbers, all the cases, genders and degrees.

In the masculine nominative singular, that is. Forms for other cases and genders are (naturally) different. To this extent - i.e. having a specific marker that occurs in the citation form of (almost) all words in a lexical class - there's plenty of natlang precedent. For instance, almost all verbs in Scandinavian end in -a in the infinitive; similarly, the marker -en appears to occur in most verbs in German and Dutch. (Heck, come to think of it, I have trouble coming up with languages where the citation forms of verbs don't always have either the same marker or one of a very limited set of those. English and Hungarian might qualify - but only because in both of these, grammarians have generally decided not to use the basic infinitive as the citation form; in English that would always be marked with the preposition to, and in Hungarian with the suffix -ni.)

Technically, I suppose a system closely resembling the one in Esperanto could arise from this kind of situation; if, for instance, Russian were to lose all case inflection and the present-day masculine nominative singular form became the sole form used for all adjectives in all positions. In practice, though, I suspect such a thing occurring may be rather unlikely, considering that the loss of case inflection typically arises from the erosion of unstressed syllables in the first place. IOW, the same process that would be most likely to eliminate case inflection from Russian (or any other language) would also be likely to eliminate such identifiable markers at the same time.

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If we admit not only affixes but also clitics, articles, particles indicative of particular lexical categories, the task may become easier - I've heard of languages with general articles that don't signal much more than that the word they are accompanying is a noun. However, I don't think I've encountered a natlang where such an unchanging particle would be present in all contexts - there tend to be other determiners which occupy the same slot, replacing it.

"A simpler case of articles is found in Kiribatese (Groves, Groves and Jacobs 1985), an
Austronesian language of Kiribati in the Pacific, where the articles vary only for number, with
a singular one and a plural one, illustrated in (20).
(20) a. te atiibu
SG stone
‘a stone, the stone’
b. taian atiibu
PLUR stone
‘stones, some stones, the stones’
Again, what these two words in Kiribatese share with the other instances of articles is that noun
phrases in Kiribatese normally occur with one of them. The word taian in (20b) can also be
called a plural word, as discussed in section 1.5. below.
An even simpler case is found in Koromfe (Rennison 1997), a Niger-Congo language
of Burkina Faso and Mali, in which there is an article a , illustrated in (21), which is used with
all common nouns except ones already modified by certain other modifiers, like demonstratives
and numerals."

from a paper "Noun phrase structure" by Matthew Dryer

In Croatian all infinitives end with -ti or -ći.

Romance...

In Latin there were extremely many -s for masculines (mostly -us), extremely many -m for neuters (mostly -um) and even more -a for feminines. This is taken to further extremes in its descendants, such as Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, where mergers have turned this into just -o and -a, and almost all nouns have them. I'd say they count. This also goes for Greek to a similar extent.

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‹› · Ḿḿ Ńń Ĺĺ Śś Źź Ąą Ǫǫ Ųų Æ̨æ̨ Ǽǽ Œ̨œ̨ Œ́œ́ Ɣɣ Y̋y̋ Įį Şş Z̧z̧ θ
Āā Ēē Īī Ōō Ūū ↗ Ṭṭ C̣c̣ Łł Ḍḍ Ṣṣ Ẓẓ Ṇṇ Ŋŋ e˞ o˞ ʷ ʲ ʰ ə

Many, many nonstandard variations of Scandinavian can have infinitives end in any consonant (maybe with the exception of /S/ in some of them), and some vowels including /a/, /i/, /e/, /u/ ...

(here's examples from my dialect, btw, examples include:

jät, siti, nyti, je, skav, bågn, harv, van`, tSän, pät`, mojn, syun`, våd`, bjär, ga, si, ryu, mejt, tapp, fyl:, roup, sabb, jyuv, säg, dejl`, fejl`, tal`, lag, färg, slooss, ryus, njyush, sveeng, lyur, sjyud, röj, bräk, bräck, rinn, hind, lamb, hå:v, kun, stamm, ram, ta, skaff, roff, spott - the only consonants I can't come up with as the final consonant in a verb are h, and non-double f (with the recent loan "surf" as an exception), and tS. tS and h only ever occur syllable-initially, though, so ...

there's two kinds of laterals, /l:/ (which word-initially is /l/, and /l`/ (which doesn't occur word-intially). short f could be argued to exist in a verb derived from chef, (=boss).

I would argue that "ti" is not part of the citation form, but is only called for in some syntactical positions. If you ask someone "va vill dö jär?" they won't say "ti far ti sjöss", they will say "far ti sjöss" or similar. Same goes for most questions even when it would call for ti if inserted directly in the sentence - it'll be omitted in isolation.

I disagree.
- The ending -o/-a is also typical of adjectives in Spanish not just nouns.
- There are plenty of nouns and adjectives that don't end in -o/-a.
- Other words such as verbs, questions words and particles also end in -o/-a.

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Ikasmu ati'uki nai uraiur.
Hinai nimuśim naimi nai sasamiur urukani. Śi'ama nai huhumiur na ni'amuśim nai sasamiur.
Pumaki nimuśim śima'a na ami nimuśim ara'a. Hini nihrasum i'aku tumra urukani na nihrasum sanik hraspir.

Nouns and adjectives are not functionally as different in Spanish as they are in many other languages. There's good reasons to consider them subsets of a single category, where the main difference is that an ~adjective is less likely to be used as a head of a NP, and a ~noun is less likely to be used attributively, but mostly, both are possible.


That's not a problem to the claim that most nouns end in -a/-o, though. noun -> -o/-a is not equal to -o/-a -> noun.

True. But I was referring the to the original post of affixes marking lexical class.

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Ikasmu ati'uki nai uraiur.
Hinai nimuśim naimi nai sasamiur urukani. Śi'ama nai huhumiur na ni'amuśim nai sasamiur.
Pumaki nimuśim śima'a na ami nimuśim ara'a. Hini nihrasum i'aku tumra urukani na nihrasum sanik hraspir.

still a fallacy of flawed logic there. doesn't help that you were referring to the original post.

How so?

The affixes -o/-a can signify more than just a noun's gender. It may be a common marker on nouns but it doesn't necessarily mean a word is noun. To me that means it's not a reliable way of telling if something is noun, it's just a good hint.

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Ikasmu ati'uki nai uraiur.
Hinai nimuśim naimi nai sasamiur urukani. Śi'ama nai huhumiur na ni'amuśim nai sasamiur.
Pumaki nimuśim śima'a na ami nimuśim ara'a. Hini nihrasum i'aku tumra urukani na nihrasum sanik hraspir.

good luck learning logics, plz

I asked for an explanation. Snarky remarks don't help me at all.

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Ikasmu ati'uki nai uraiur.
Hinai nimuśim naimi nai sasamiur urukani. Śi'ama nai huhumiur na ni'amuśim nai sasamiur.
Pumaki nimuśim śima'a na ami nimuśim ara'a. Hini nihrasum i'aku tumra urukani na nihrasum sanik hraspir.

Seriously, what the hell?

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A implies B does not imply that B implies A. As simple as that, it's an application of those.

Let's apply them

"It's a noun" implies "it ends in -a or -o" cannot be falsified by a verb ending an -a or -o.

I see. But that's not what I want to say. I probably should have read the thread all the way through though.

I'm saying that -o/-a is not a 100% way of determining if something is a noun. For me, frequency is not enough for something to be called a lexical affix. I'd prefer to see something that is reserved only for a particular lexical class.

I'm also not sure if the percentage of Spanish nouns ending in -o/-a is high enough for me to want to call it an explicit noun marker. (But that's a question of threshold.)

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Ikasmu ati'uki nai uraiur.
Hinai nimuśim naimi nai sasamiur urukani. Śi'ama nai huhumiur na ni'amuśim nai sasamiur.
Pumaki nimuśim śima'a na ami nimuśim ara'a. Hini nihrasum i'aku tumra urukani na nihrasum sanik hraspir.

True, but is that what the OP is asking for? The thread title, citing Esperanto as an example, and this...

...seem to imply that they're asking for situations where an affix explicitly marks lexical class. In which case Spanish a/o doesn't qualify. (Of course, it also doesn't qualify because there's a significant number of nouns in Spanish that end in a consonant. And if we're looking specifically for affixes that solely mark lexical class and not for ones that actually mark something else - such as case - but from which lexical class can be inferred, then these Spanish endings might also not qualify since they indicate gender as well. Well, most of the time, anyway.)

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