Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Question about a grammatical term

From:Roger Mills <romilly@...>
Date:Wednesday, October 2, 2002, 16:42
bnathyuw wrote:
> >just to complicate matters, compounding can be further >analysed. sanskrt does this pretty systematically, but >i can't remember whether it has a term for this sort >of compound > >examples are : > >dvandva compounds ( eg janaba:lau, man and child, from >janas, man and ba:lam, child ( i think ) ) >bahuvrihi compounds ( itself an example, meaning 'much >riced', cf greek 'polyphloisboio thalasse:s' &c ) >
Thanks for jogging my memory; I could only summon up dvandva. IIRC there are other types--N-N and Adj-N-- some term involving "purus.a..." (tatpurus.a?) and maybe a fourth?-- that are comparable to the Engl. examples. Hmmm-- our Skt. teacher back in the 70s had us translate things like "flower power" (pus.pashakti IIRC), which seems neither dvandva nor bahuvrihi... What about "four-legged/footed" in Skt; Greek apparently could do tetrapod-, Lat. quadruped- Chomsky and Halle's SPE dealt quite extensively with these Engl. N-N and Adj-N compounds, (and IIRC had terms for them) since they play a role in stress placement. Prototypical example: White House (the president's residence) stressed 1-3 (or 1-2?) white house (any house of that color) stressed 2-1 without the capitalization clue: big house (slang for "prison") 1-3 (1-2?) big house 2-l Some are written together, probably from tradition: blackberry (the specific fruit) main stress on black black berry (any black berry) main stress on berry Indonesian (and many other languages, such as Kash) does it just the other way around: IN. rumah makan (house eat) 'restaurant' kaca mata (glass eye) 'eyeglasses' (probably mata kaca would be 'an artificial/glass eye') mata air (eye water) 'a natural spring' (mata often fig. 'the main part of s.t.') air mata 'tears' (Other IN languages don't: Kisar oiri makan (water-eye) 'spring', makan oiri 'tears', Ambonese Malay mata rumah 'head of the household'

Replies

H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...>
John Cowan <jcowan@...>