Re: Terms of Endearment

On Wed, 30 Apr 2003 14:27:09 +0100, Chris Bates
<christopher.bates@...> wrote:

> While I was thinking about that I got onto "to love" and "to like". Do
>many natural languages distinguish between the two? French doesn't (je
>t'aime = I like/love you), but spanish does (amo = I love, me gusta(n) =
>I like (lit it pleases me)), and a quick peruse of a dictionary suggests
>that Latin didn't either. How many people have the distinction in their
>conlang?
Harpelan has that distinction. The verb for "to like" is like spanish
gustar. It also distinguishes eros and agape (Those are reasonable
translations of the two words for 'love' that I have now, anyway). "lust" is
literally "without agape eros" (this could actually mean "eros without
agape" or "with neither eros nor agape"; the choice of wording indicates
their disdain for the emotion). I think there will be a word for parental
love as well.

In Japanese, there is 'suki', which is similar to English 'like'. Saying "I
like you" in Japanese is ambiguous in the same way as it is in English. 'Ai'
means 'love'. Interestingly, neither is a verb.

> And finally, adjectives used as nouns. Do many conlangs/natlangs allow
>free use of adjectives as nouns? English does but its restricted, there
>are only a few adjectives that don't sound wrong when used as nouns (ie
>the blond(e) the wise the old (the last two used only collectively)),
>whereas spanish and french seem to allow much freer use of adjectives of
>nouns (see ma petite above, and querido). Of course, this question has
>no meaning if a language has stative verbs instead of adjectives.
> Sorry, the first thing led onto the other two lol...
I don't know if it's significant, but in my limited experience with Spanish
I get the feeling that when the adjective is used as a noun, it changes
character; the word may as well be conjugated differently for the way it feels.