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

To go back to the typecasting metaphor, the idea behind typecasting is
that it represents the identity operation.  The copula, as it were.
Sure, there are infinitely many functions that receive a character
string as input and return a floating point number as output, but the
"obvious" one that needs no qualification is the one that returns the
"value" of the string - presumably the one it  would represent if
entered as a numeric literal in the source code.

This is not always clear-cut, and is therefore a good metaphor for the
sort of munging under discussion.  The regular part-of-speech endings
in E-o inspired me to do likewise in my early conlangs...  e.g. all
nouns in Shalakar end in "-wa"... and I very quickly ran up against
the problem of defining a general rule for deriving the meaning of a
trans-part-of-speeched root.  There is no such rule that is wholly
satisfactory, IMO.



On 8/10/08, Dana Nutter <li_sasxsek@...> wrote:
>> [mailto:CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu] On Behalf Of
> caeruleancentaur
>
>> > <Liase> is quite interesting, since <-on> isn't (AFAIK) a
>> > derivational affix in English, such that it could be removed
> from
>> > the word, the way that <-ance> is. I guess that's similar to
>> > <-aholic> from <alcoholic>. I am trying to think of other
> examples
>> > of that same thing happening, but they aren't coming to me.
>>
>> These come to my mind:
>> hamburger > cheeseburger (named after the German city
> Cheeseburg)
>> execute > electrocute
>
> Or "-gate" (< Watergate) for scandals like "Billygate" or
> "Contragate".
>
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Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>