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Re: Substitives and suffixes

From:Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
Date:Tuesday, August 29, 2000, 13:26
On Mon, 28 Aug 2000, DOUGLAS KOLLER wrote:

> From: "Matthew Kehrt" > > > During the course, I realized that English has many ways of forming > > new words. Two of these are substitive words, where a word is used as > > another part of speech (i.e. American for an American PERSON; noun > > becomes an adjective) and the process of adding suffixes to change > > the part of speech (for example teacher from teach + -ER). > > > > What I want to know is whether these two processes are standard in > > other natlangs as well. I speak a little French, but not enough to > > know. I specifically am wondering about non-IE langs such as > > Japanese. > > All the languages I'm familiar with allow suffixing. Depending on how > adjectives are treated in a given language, I would think crossing the > adjective-noun divide (as in Latin or other Eurolangs) or the adjective-verb > divide (as in Chinese) could be relatively easy. The noun-verb divide might > be trickier to ford depending on how much a given language inflects. Many
In the current conlang I'm thinking these processes would be very natural for speakers due to the system of inflections going from various infinitive-aspect verbs to adjective to three kinds of nouns. Loan words would probably be assimilated, mutilated, and inflected. For anything else I figure compound formations will do the trick, though I haven't worked out details yet. How does Arabic or Hebrew borrow words, frex? YHL