Re: Verbal nouns

On Tue, Oct 03, 2000 at 01:58:24PM -0700, jesse stephen bangs wrote:
[snip]
> <eerie ghost-story voice>  Beware . . . you are entering a semantic
> netherworld where you may discover frightening things about you and your
> conlang that you had never suspected, and which may shake your assumptions
> to the core.  </end eerie ghost-story voice>.  The largest change I ever
> made to my conlang all at the same time came after I started thinking
> about what happens when you verbalize an agentive noun, and before I knew
> it my entire verbal system was in shambles and had to be painstakingly
> reconstructed.  I had to add five new kinds of verbal constructs and a
> semantic noun class distinction before I had it right.  But it was worth
> it--my conlang's much better now.
Hmm. My conlang is already pretty ... um... *strange*, as it is.
Verbalizing an agentive noun doesn't seem that big a deal to me... well,
my conlang doesn't really have agentive nouns, if you want to know how it
works, check the archives for my lenghty posts on it. :-P  But I don't see
how this will cause great changes in my conlang though.


T