Padraic wrote:
> > And is there such a thing as patient nouns?
>
> Sure. "Teacher" etc. This isn't the same kind of
> agency you get in verbs. An agent noun is simply
> an expression of who does the thing described: a
> teacher is the person that does teaching. In IE
> languages, they often show up with -r endings.
Harking back to the Latin terminology I've encountered in old grammars:
nomina agentis : agent nouns "person who does VERB"
nomina patientis: "patient nouns" "thing that is VERB-ed"
(and others)
Indonesian morphology separates these quite clearly (unlike Engl. in a lot
of cases)
tanya (to) question
penanya questioner, interrogator (peng+tanya)
pertanyaan a question (some verbs form their pat.noun simply with -an)
> Agent (curiously enough, itself is not an agent
> noun, but rather a participle!) means "doing" and
> that describes very nicely what these nouns are
> up to.
Similarly "patient" --- "suffering"