Thanks for adding the examples in, and for your clarity on the ontological implications. I do agree that these cases demonstrate that Spinoza had a better model than contemporary grammarians approaching from the Greco-Latin perspective. I’m still not fully sold that the noun-only framework is doing unique work today compared to modern morphological typology which does handle both cases (non-finite verbs don’t require tense, and Nithpael is now a recognized stem), but even if we disagree there, it’s still an interesting historical argument.
Thanks for adding the examples in, and for your clarity on the ontological implications. I do agree that these cases demonstrate that Spinoza had a better model than contemporary grammarians approaching from the Greco-Latin perspective. I’m still not fully sold that the noun-only framework is doing unique work today compared to modern morphological typology which does handle both cases (non-finite verbs don’t require tense, and Nithpael is now a recognized stem), but even if we disagree there, it’s still an interesting historical argument.
I’m not particularly making a claim vs present-day paradigms in linguistics.