Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: THEORY nouns and cases (was: Verbs derived from noun cases)

From:Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Date:Thursday, April 29, 2004, 15:37
Quoting John Cowan <cowan@...>:

> Philippe Caquant scripsit:
> > No, really, I cannot feel it this way, although it's > > hard for me to explain exactly why, especially in > > English. I just feel that a "dog" is perceived as an > > entity (a thing of its own), while "a thing that is > > brown" is not [and yet, when you think of a dog, you > > probably imagine some particular kind of dog, a > > prototype; but what is the prototype of a brown thing > > ?]. > > A good counterexample is "fist", which is a noun in the IE languages and > Chinese (and probably lots of others) despite the obvious fact that it > represents a certain state of the hand, and sometimes even inchoatively > so: "He clenched his fists" refers to the hands as fists even though > they don't become fists until after they are clenched. So our feeling > for noun-ness is mere habit.
Um, on that logic, just about any everyday concrete noun is a good counterexample - a hand, afterall, is just one out of a very strictly limited set of configurations of mostly water and some organic compounds. Andreas

Replies

Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...>
<jcowan@...>