Re: Substitives and suffixes

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