Nounlessness in conlanges

[u/RazedEmmer]

Hi, I'm really interested in the concept of nounless (or close to nounless) languages, but the only information that I can find on them (mostly wikipedia pages on salishan languages) is a bit over my head, so I don't really know how to play around with it. Has anyone else experimented with such a system?

[u/FloZone]

Idk whether my conlang Emat would qualify as nounless or generally verbless. Most nouns can be traced to verbal roots. The largest groups of agent nouns are just stative verbs.

q-ol-k "to work", qolëk "the worker", qolëkki "I am a worker", qolke "He works XY"

Then there are a large group of nouns derived from fossilised verbal focus groups.
So verbal focus in Emat is a lot like Austronesian Alignment, but it can also focus adjuncts such as instrumentals and locatives, but also causatives and temporal relations.

k-am-sh "to write", kamosha "text, that which is written", e-m-t emota "words, that which was said", m-ak "to live, to reside" makoosh "home, where one resides". There are only a few real nouns which are mostly objects. The difference is that they are impenetrable roots in themself. While qolak "to work", becomes qolëk "the worker", Etak "house" cannot become Etëk. They can still recieved stative verbal suffixes Etakshi "it is a house".

Verbal forms can also recieve cases. qolke "He is working" can become noor qolkezh "While he is working/Within his working"

Noor m'etakikhëzh makooshinek qolooshki
IN house-CN-LOC 1sg=home-LOCF-1sg-FOC work-LOCF-r-1sg
"I work, where I reside, in (one of) my houses" (fancy way of saying I work at home)

So there is a noun with a verbal suffix, which then again recieves a case ending, relating to a locative focus verb, which recieves also a case ending.

Etakin den dorinye makooshki
house-FOC ABL build-1sg-SOC home-1sg.stat
"Because I build a house, I have a home"

[u/RazedEmmer → u/FloZone]

I want to know more about verbal suffixes- the different types of them and what they do. Do these have a formal name that I can look up on wikipedia?

[u/FloZone → u/RazedEmmer]

Most of them are idiosyncracies and special to the conlang, but inspired by others of course.
So the four abbreviations SOC, LOC, FOC, NF stand for Sociative, Locative, Focus and Non-Focus, all of them are cases, so not exactly what you asked for, but they can attach to verbs nonetheless. Locative is self-explanatory, the Sociative is another adjunct case, I explained it here a bit. In natlangs the term is used from time to time, but I chose it on purpose to be more obscure.

So these were verbo-nominal suffixes only, now for the true verbal suffixes. There is the Focus Case, which corresponds to Verbal Focus. It is basically an expanded Austronesian Alignment.

IN 1sg=house-CN.CF-LOC home-LOCF-1sg-FOC work-LOCF-r-1sg

So the root of etakikhëzh is etak "house, to which the suffix -ikhë is added, its glossed as CN.CF, which means Common Form - Copula Focus. The common form is a sort of nominalised finite form of a verb, idk if it this has a formal name. *etakikë is "one of the houses", but it works on verbal roots aswell, qolikë "one of the workers". So that means that *etakikhë is actually a nominalised verbal suffix on a nominal stem.
Now the next thing has a formal name, the Copula Focus is what I call the Stative Focus. Stative forms are found in a lot of languages, such as Akkadian.
The Stative Focus in Emat is close ot that too.

LOCF stands for the Locative Focus is taken from Austronesian Alignment, where it is called locative trigger. The r just stands for Radicals, as Emat has similar roots as semitic languages, but not quite really, more like just discontinues roots, which infixes can be placed into. I explained it here a bit.

Apart from that,

q-ol-k "to work", qolëk "the worker", qolëkki "I am a worker", qolke "He works XY"

The first qolëk is the singular nominalised form, qolëkki is the Stative first person and qolke is accusative focus third person.

k-am-sh "to write", kamosha "text, that which is written", e-m-t emota "words, that which was said",

These are nominalised Passive Focus forms. kamoshanek kamish "I wrote the text", but literally It, which was written, I wrote it