Re: verbs = nouns?

On Wed, Jan 10, 2001 at 12:53:44PM -0500, Roger Mills wrote:
[snip]
> Is _hen2_ 'very'? (I'll assume so)....And is wei4dao4 a noun or verb?. Can
> we tell?
wei4dao4 is a noun. It means "flavor". Perhaps a possible Malay rendition
of this would be:
        Nasi yang dimasaknya rasanya sangat lazat.

OK, this could be forcing it a bit, but at least "rasa" in Malay can be
construed as a noun, so this is probably as close as one can get to the
Chinese version. But while "rasa" can also be a verb, "wei4dao4" cannot,
so I'm not sure how to parse the Chinese.

[snip]
> As for the car turning red......unless it's a magical car, doesn't make a
> lot of sense in any language, no?
:-) True. But in Chinese, you *could* say something like "che1 hong2le" to
express the fact that somebody has finally finished painting the car red.
OK, this is rather contrived, but I can see it happening :-)


>  How about:
> bunga merah 'a red flower', bunga merah itu 'the/that red flower' (phrase
> intonation, main stress on merah/itu respectively
> bunga merah with sentence intonation (some stress on bu-, rise/pause
> on -nga, main stress on merah) would be a general statement: a flower is red
> ~ flowers are red. (Perhaps a little odd, but I'm not a native speaker; but
> intonation is very important in Indonesian)
Ah yes. That's the right intonation if you wanted it to mean "the flower
is red". At least, in Malay it is. :-)

> bunga itu merah 'the flower is red'
> bunga memerah 'a/the flower is turning red' (meN+merah is definitely a
> verb); one's face can also "memerah".
> Ia memerahkan bunga 's/he reddened~made red the flower' ( a little odd,
> perhaps she's a painter, or is coloring artificial flowers).
Hmm. This construction sounds awkward to me, for some reason.

>  The dictionary
> ex. for this form is "memerahkan bibirnya" 'reddened her lips (applied
> lipstick)'
Ah, OK. For some reason, it seems to make more sense here :-P


T

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