Re: Ideas for deriving verbs from nouns

Amanda Babcock wrote:

> Anybody have some more candidates?
Hi, Amanda, glad you delurked!

Well, in Mungayöd, parts of speech are not so strictly divided
morphologically as they are in English and suchlike. Words freely
traverse the boundaries between verb, noun, adjective and adverb. They
inflect in such ways that, in practice, there is little or no ambiguity
of speech part. Verbs have their inflectional system, nouns have their
articles, and adjectives and adverbs are differentiated by position
(i.e., adverb follows the verb, and adjective follows the noun).

For example, "reiljë" - mainly the verb "to rule", can function in all
four semantic roles.

Verb: reiljëka (1PS), reiljëwis (2PS), reiljëti (3PS), etc.

Noun:           iì reiljë - "the king" NOM
                liì reiljë - ACC
                to reiljët - DAT
                wai reiljëng - GEN
                zilì reiljë - LOC
                sò reiljë - INST
                dji reiljë - LAT

Notice how only dative and genitive actually inflect the noun itself.
Everything else is taken care of just by the article.
Plurals: fei, lèfi, tèfei, wei, feizê, sòfei, feidju
Indefinite: ang, lang, tòng, wang, zing, sòng, djing

Both adjectives and adverbs are derived from the verb infinitive by
simply adding "-s" to the end. So "reiljës" is both "royal" and "royally".

Mungayöd words tend to do this sort of cross-pollination very easily.
It's mostly because I never really came up with a reliable POS
derivation scheme. My other main language, Glïzxföösee, is a
consonant-root language, so the derivation procedures are pre-built into
the morphology. Don't ask me what it is, I haven't fleshed it out yet.
I'll certainly post it here when(/if) I ever get around to it.

I hope this gives you some idea of what others have done about that
particularly thorny (IMHO) area of grammar. I think the basic rule here
on conlang is that if you like it and it makes sense to you, do it. :)

--
Daniel Seriff
microtonal@sericap.com
http://members.tripod.com/microtonal

Futharusào li utsoto wi pæthong, raskèsào lang li!
Si me iterum insanum appelles, oculum alterum tuum edem.

Reply