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

On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 12:22 PM, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...> wrote:

>>> 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.
I saw _The Clone Wars_ today -- no conlang content except
for a few lines of dialogue in Huttese, which barely counts
anyway, so enough of that -- no, the reason I revived this thread
is the problems that occurred to me when I wrote in my
journal this evening about seeing the movie: how to translate
the title into gzb?   In particular, how to translate the adjectival or apposite
use of "clone" modifying "wars"?   (I didn't have a word for "clone"
yet, and worried that I might need a new root word, but a few
moments' thought yielded {tâ-čĭ}, "sibling-copy".)   I tried out
a few adjectival suffixes, but none seemed satisfactory;
{-za} "pertaining to" was too vague, and none of the others
made sense at all.   Finally I rendered it with a postpositional
phrase:

{tâ-čĭ-cu syj-i sîðyr-źa-cu}
sibling-copy-system use-at fight-AUG-system

that is, a war (system of battles) wherein a clone army is used.

The upshot?  An engelang like gzb that requires you to be very
specific about relationships like this is harder to use than
Esperanto, where the adjectival derivations are morphologically
uniform and semantically vague; though maybe easier than
a natlang like French or (to some extent) English where you have
to memorize the adjective that goes with each noun and
some nouns have no corresponding adjective.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/fluency-survey.html
Conlang fluency survey -- there's still time to participate before
I analyze the results and write the article

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