Re: Linguistic term for ease of changing word-class (was: 'out-' affix in conlangs?)

Jim Henry skrev:
 > On Sat, Aug 9, 2008 at 12:45 PM, Eldin Raigmore
 > <eldin_raigmore@...> wrote:
 >> I know there are languages with no class of
 >> adverbs distinct from their class of
 >> adjectives; but aren't many "semantic cases"
 >> (that is, cases other than "syntactic cases",
 >> that show something other than the "grammatical
 >> relations" of Subject, Object, or Indirect
 >> Object) also "adverbial cases"? Isn't a noun in
 >> a case other than Nominative, Accusative,
 >> Dative, or Genitive, essentially an adverb? So,
 >> the "changing of a noun into an adverb" is
 >> likely to
 >
 > It seems to me that in a verb-drop language like
 > gjâ-zym-byn, or a verbless language like Kelen,
 > some such cases act more like verbs in other
 > language than like adverbial phrases.

Somehow the plethora of verbal nouns in Classical
Mongolian also comes to mind...


 > On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 8:04 AM, Benct Philip
 > Jonsson <bpj@...> wrote:
 >
 >> genitive "of teeth". In the days when I was
 >> actually reading and writing Esperanto (some 20
 >> years ago now) i often felt that
 >> adjectivization ('casting to adjective') and
 >> the _de_ genitive often overlapped
 >> semantically.
 >
 > That's true.

My gut feeling always was that the plain -a
derivation ought to mean 'pertaining to' and that
-eca ought to be used a lot more than it is.

 >> Från: Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...>
 >
 >>> Or "made of X" or "resembling, savoring of
 >>> X" (though there's also the more specific
 >>> "-eca" for that), or "for the benefit of X"
 >>> or "suitable for X" or "originating from
 >>> X"... Issues like these were why I came up
 >>> with the set of adjective-deriving suffixes
 >>> I did for gzb.
 >> Would you mind to give a list of those
 >> suffixes?
 >
 > The list here,
 >
 > http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/gzb/semantic-
 > .htm#p43
 >
 > is reasonably complete, though there are a
 > couple of suffixes added in the last year or two
 > that aren't documented on the website yet. I'm
 > planning to rewrite the whole section on
 > derivational morphology (except the section on
 > numbers, which I'm fairly satisfied with)
 > instead of just continuing to patch it here and
 > there; I want it to be better organized and it
 > seems that it would be clearer with more focus
 > on how gzb works in itself and fewer digressions
 > comparing suffixes to Esperanto equivalents.

Yes, it seems a little awkward to suppose that
anyone interested in gzb should know Esperanto...

 > I've been re-reading Claude Piron's _Le Defi des
 > Langues_, in which he talks among other things
 > about his experience as a translator at the UN
 > and WHO; he says most of a translator's time is
 > taken up with researching ambiguities in the
 > source text in areas where the target language's
 > grammar or semantics requires them to be more
 > specific than the source language.

Yes it works both ways. As I said natlangs allow
for both vagueness and precision, but in a random
way, so that not all possible types allow for one
or the other. I feel handicapped all the time when
translating from English into Swedish by the fact
that English has a much larger pool of nouns and
adjectives (in principle any Latin word is a
potential English word) than Swedish, though that
is mostly a matter of stylistics. Sometimes
Swedish is more specific than English as when
there is no direct equivalent of "toothy"; you'd
have to say "tandaktig", "tandlik" or "full av
tänder". To be sure you could coin "tandig" but
it would have a strong bias towards meaning the
same thing as "tandaktig". BTW it would be very
hard to translate the difference between
"tandaktig" 'of a tooth-like nature" and "tandlik"
'similar to teeth' into English in a stylistically
equivalent manner.

 >> Has someone made a list of such types, whether
 >> actually distinguished in natlangs or
 >> semantically distinguishable or logically
 >> possible?
 >
 > I started making a stab at it here,
 >
 > http://conlang.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_derivatio-
 > n_methods
 >
 > but it's still pretty incomplete. Y'all are
 > welcome to add to it.
 >

Ah, thanks! (Now maybe I'll have to dig up my
wikia password...)


/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch atte melroch dotte
se
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  "C'est en vain que nos Josués littéraires
  crient à la langue de s'arrêter; les langues
  ni le soleil ne s'arrêtent plus. Le jour où
  elles se *fixent*, c'est qu'elles meurent."
  (Victor Hugo)