Re: Verbal nouns

> > > Example:
> > > nabazu: to insult/be the enemy of, infinitive.
> > >
> > > Sjar naía nabazas: You insult me.  The conjugation -as is present reportive.
> > >
> > > If you wanted to say "Insulting people is bad," you'd have to decline nabazu:
> > > nabaza (voluntary actor case)
> >
> > Excellent!  This sort of noun/verb conflation is very similar to what
> > Yivrindil does, except that the ending is not a zero ending.  In the
>
> <blink>  Zero ending?
>
> I list all nouns in the voluntary actor case for convenience.  I guess
> the "root" noun form would be nabaz- but it *never* occurs in Chevraqis.
> (Unless Qenaren/Avren linguists are smarter than I am, which is very
> possible.)
Oh, I see. I had been assuming that the "root" was *nabazu* which was the
reference form for both the nouns and the verbs--so in isolation the word
*nabazu* could be taken as either "to insult" or "insult."  The rest of
your letter clears this up.

> Neat.  :-)  Theoretically I could just list the base infinitive verb,
> since I'm using triconsonantal morphology and all the other infinitive
> verbs, adjective and noun forms are derived using affixes.  But when you
> have a base verb "rasranu" that means "to race/run" and its related forms
> mean things like "wind," "horse," and "journey," it would be too
> confusing to just list one verb form.  Linking together all the different
> meanings of verb/noun/adjective forms is really fun because it gets me to
> think about the concultures involved.
This is much more difficult than the Yivrindil situation!  The semantic
relationships between derivatives in Yivrindil are usually regular, and
when they are I don't bother to list them separately.  Only when a word
has undergone significant semantic drift does it merit its own
entry.  For example, from the word *kenda* "king" you can get (among
others) the verb *kendaya* "to rule", adjective *kendil* "royal", adverb
*kendon* "royally", verb *kendahya* "to make king, i.e. to crown".
None of these are given their own entry.  However, the word *rukenda*
"usurper, rebel" has its own entry since it doesn't exactly follow from it
parts "anti-king."  Thus, Yivrindil tends more towards the side of making
the dictionary-user do the work, since the dictionary-maker is rather lazy
:-).

> > Do you have trouble with inflected forms of nouns or verbs being
> > ambiguous, so that morphologically it might be impossible to tell if a
> > given word is being used nominally or verbally?
>
> Almost.  -ad is the locative suffix, but in one of the conjugations--I
> *think* it's present plain--verbs conjugate with -ad.  However,
> verb-stems and noun-stems are usually distinguishable by the vowel affixes,
> e.g.
>
> [examples snipped]
>
> I figure context will do the job where I screwed up morphology.  :-p
A safe bet.  In Yivrindil, the ablative case of many nouns is identical
with an adverb form, but this doesn't usually affect interpretation too
much.  This doesn't seem to be a problem in the natlangs I've studied
either--essential since my lang goes for naturalness.

> > > This doesn't work or make much sense for every noun I have, but I'm
> > > working on metaphorical or poetic usages...eventually.  :-)
> >
> > Yeah, I run into the same problem.  There are some verbs that don't seem
> > to come from any noun, and some nouns that don't make any sense as a verb
> > form.  With some work you can make the system fit, although I've found
> > that it's impossible to have the lexicon be *completely* regular with it
> > noun-verb correspondences.
>
> <G>  I don't even try for complete regularity, but then again, the
> conlang is supposed to be theoretically somewhat naturalistic.  All the
> better for poetry....
Definitely :)

>
> YHL
>
Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
"All for the sake of paradise, the tyrants of our generation stacked
bodies higher than Nimrod stacked bricks, yet they came no nearer heaven
than he did."  --J. Budziszevsky