Re: Substitives and suffixes

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
words in Chinese and English hop from one part of speech to another with
great facility. Eurolangs usually have to tweek nouns somehow to make them
verbs. It's not rocket science, but you can't just take a noun in, say,
French, and use it carte blanche as a verb; you'd have to make it, usually,
an -ER verb. (If "dog" were somehow a verb in French, you couldn't just
'chien', you'd have to 'chienner'.) Or you could add the verb "faire" to
some weird new (foreign) noun, as in "faire relax". Japanese does something
similar with its Chinese imports; "hatten", "development" plus "suru", "do"
becomes "hatten suru", "develop."  But you can't do that all the time;
"kakumei", "revolution", but "kakumei suru" for "revolt" doesn't work for
all speakers and sounds like Valley Girl Speak for "Oo, let's do
revolution."

Kou