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

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.

> be fairly "easy" -- highly productive -- in most languages with a robust case
> system, right?  And Genitive, in those languages that have one, is essentially a
> way of changing a noun into an adjective, isn't it?
Semantically, more or less.  Morphosyntactically, as Benct pointed out,
adjectives tend to have different inflectional and maybe
distributional properties
than genitive nouns.

> I'd think you'd want to take each pair of large open word-classes and ask
> whether there is a derivation method that applies to almost every word in the
> first one to produce a word in the second one.
I have just this sort of system for säb zjeda.  With four semantic classes
corresponding to five word classes, there are twenty possible
conversions, and I've figured out how to make eighteen of them meaningful.
See:

http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/conlang13/grammar-p1.htm

I'm not sure yet what it would mean to convert an entity or quality root
into a preposition.

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.


> 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.


> Ido at least does the right thing in that it
> allows the choice between vagueness and precision,
> while engelangs tend to offer only precision. This
> may not be a very big problem if you are composing
> an original text, but what if you're translating
> from a natlang where the original expression is
> vague? You'd have to choose a precise expression
> which may not be 100 per cent justified by the
> context in the original, but the greatest
> objection is that vagueness is often stylistically
> and pragmatically desirable in human comunication
> just as much as precision is.
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.


> 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_derivation_methods

but it's still pretty incomplete.  Y'all are welcome
to add to it.

--
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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