Re: Ideas for deriving verbs from nouns

(Second version-- No. 1 got lost in a brief power outage.  Aargh. Portent of
things to come?)
Amanda Babcock wrote:

(some snips)

>Hello, longtime lurker here, asking for pointers to helpful examples...
>Anyway, I'm getting stuck on deriving verbs from nouns.  A little
background:
>I've always been obsessed with the idea of a language where either all
nouns
>are derived from verbs, or where all verbs are derived from nouns.  I tried
>the former in high school, quickly giving up because it seemed so
unrealistic;
>now I'm trying the latter.
>For example, one of the nouns I've made is "gift".  I figured I could make
>a verb out of it that, depending on which role the trigger is in, would
>mean "give", "receive", "be given" etc.
>
>However, upon further reflection, I can't justify to myself why the noun
>should be "gift" and not "giver", "recipient" or one of the other roles.
>Or "giving", in which case I'd seriously have to consider whether I'm
>inventing nouns at all or just verbs whose infinitives can be used as
nouns.

That is indeed the problem.  PERSONALLY I feel that the verb is basic, the
various related nouns derived.  There are some grey areas:  true/truth,
beauty/beautiful-- which is basic, which derived?  And then there are nouns
that are simply...nouns-- dog, chair, grass, body parts, etc.  You can
verbify these figuratively, but that becomes very language/culture-specific.
This is certainly the way my Kash works.

That's not to say that your envisioned system could not work, but might
involve a lot of very (overly?) precise semantic and logical analysis.  For
instance, "recipient" to me is not necessarily or always the reciprocal of
"giver":   would your "recipient < giver" also apply to the "recipient" of
an e-mail?  I don't see much "giving" there; I can see how it might work,
but it might be implying something that wasn't intended.

I'd go so far as to say:  I _suspect_  verb-central : noun-derivative is one
of the underlying features of all natlangs.  (Though I'm working with a
limited sample!)

Nevertheless, it would be a very interesting conlang and well worth trying.
Whichever noun-aspect you choose as "basic" is up to you.  Probably (though
I'm not sure it's necessary) try to be consistent:  if "giver : give" then
also "runner : run".
It'll be interesting to see how you treat true/truth etc, and dog/chair etc.
>....
>Finally, can anybody suggest pointers with examples (conlang or natlang)
>on various systems of deriving verbs from nouns?  Or languages where there
>is no distinction between nouns and verbs, but the core words are more
>nounlike than verblike
English strikes me as one that has very fuzzy distinctions-- we can make a
verb out of almost any noun, and to some extent vice-versa.  So can
colloquial Indonesian in many cases (morphological markers required in
others).  Conlang: Kash has just a few nouns that can be verbs (sisa: love
[n.], lover; to love), but lots of nouns derived from verbs (tosho 'to
bake':  andosho 'baked goods', kandosho 'baker'-- andosho ought properly to
mean 'oven' (thing that does VERB), but that's yundrosho, a compound with
yurun 'place').  Speaking of that:  how will you distinguish e.g.
transitive/intrans. "bake"?  The cookies are baking vs. I'm baking cookies.
?

NO OFFENSE INTENDED:  of the many conlangs I've seen here, only a handful
show -- to my view-- genuinely original/odd/unexpected/non-natlang (shall we
say alien?) categories or structures. (No names, but Kash isn't one of
them.) This is a compliment!

>I think I just need to
>break through a conceptual barrier here.
Amen and good luck.

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