Re: Verbal nouns

On Tue, 3 Oct 2000, H. S. Teoh wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 02, 2000 at 10:27:42PM -0400, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> [snip]
> > Chevraqis can treat verbs as nouns and nouns as verbs.  In the first
> > case, they decline like other nouns, and in the second case, you can
> > conjugate them.
>
> Cool. I'm working on a similar feature in my conlang...
My conlang already has this, as I just mentioned . . .

> [snip]
> I'm working on making up a set of morphemes that can convert any (well,
> almost any) verb/noun/relative to any other. You can verbalize a noun, or
> nominalize a verb, or even verbalize a nominalized verb! Of course, each
> morpheme will carry a slight nuance; so verbalizing a nominalized verb
> will actually mean something more than the original verb itself. For
> example, in English: "to play" nominalizes to "player" which verbalizes to
> "to playerize" (i.e., to make into a person who plays). Bad example off
> the top of my head, but you get the idea -- "to playerize" has acquired
> more meaning than the original verb "to play".
<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.

>
>
> T
>
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