Re: verbs = nouns?

On Thu, Jan 11, 2001 at 10:43:55PM -0500, DOUGLAS KOLLER wrote:
[snip]
> Be afraid, H.S., be very afraid. :)
:-)

> Okay, admittedly I had weird sentences like "Che1 hong2guo4 mei2 you3?" (Has
> the car been red before?) in mind. I suppose sentences like:
> "Ni3 yi3qian2 he1 jiu3, lian3 you3 mei2 you3 hong2guo4?" (When you drank
> wine before, did your face turn red?) are more than possible, if uncommon
> and a bit forced.
Yeah, a bit contrived, but certainly possible. :-)

[snip]
> All righty then, if these affixations *are* possible with a word like
> "hong2", it only goes to further show that adjectives are more verb-like
> than you've given them credit for.
I guess so :-) Though I did admit already that I misunderstood what a
stative verb was; the idea that adjectives are stative verbs isn't really
that strange. Though it does feel weird to realize that my understanding
of how the language works turns out to be possibly incorrect :-P

I don't know why -- perhaps it's because of my early exposure to English
-- but I just find it hard to convince myself that Chinese adjectives
really aren't the same as English adjectives.


T

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