What Actually Is A Verb?

[@JoseVillegas323]

Thank you! This is excellent. One of my favorite topics.

[@VilcxjoVakero]

I'm not sure how relevant it is as a point/question, but I'll shoot anyway: diachrony seems to me to complicate part of speech a bit. I'm thinking in particular about the tendency of Semitic languages (or at least Hebrew and Aramaic, the only ones I've studied) to turn participles into new tenses of verb (the present tense most recently, but probably also the perfect at a prehistoric stage). On one hand I have no trouble understanding how it happens, since these languages make use of zero copulae all the time. But it does feel like it begs the question of, if a word now used as a predicative verb was, at an earlier point in its use, specifically deverbal/attributive... doesn't that mean that there must have been a transitional point where it was ambiguously or only 'sort of' predicative? E.g., speakers thinking of its predicative use as a bit weird, or not knowing if they are using a zero copula with it or not?

[@ScienceMeetsFiction]

What was the language with two separate noun-like categories? It sounded more like Hiw than anything else, but I can't find any clear information about that language doing something like that.

[@LoganKearsley]

@ScienceMeetsFiction Yes, it's Hiw. See François, A. (2017). The economy of word classes in Hiw, Vanuatu: Grammatically flexible, lexically rigid. Studies in Language, 41(2), 294-357. I'll add that reference to the video description.