verb tenses of nouns (was Re: Newbie says hi)

> >Now I'm looking into Mohawk,
> >thanks to some suggestions from this list, where most of the nouns seem
> >to be built out of verbs -
>
> Is that where for instance "house" can be put into different tenses - past
> tense house = "ruins" etc.? I suppose you could use the past tense of
> "parrot" in that Monty Python sketch :)
>
I have thought about that idea before (I love Monty Python!).  I was
thinking that the infinitive could denote a general class of noun, for
example "to bird" would be to fall into the category of bird, or to be the
essence of the bird.

Jake