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...
<wry g>  It was almost automatic in Chevraqis because of the way the
morphology was set up.  Someday I need to go and learn a real Semitic
language...I have my eyes on Arabic.  Someday.

> [snip]
> > This doesn't work or make much sense for every noun I have, but I'm
> > working on metaphorical or poetic usages...eventually.  :-)
> [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
<laugh>  Neat!  I'm probably not going to bother with Chevraqis...since
every root can noun, verb or adjective/adverb itself.  OTOH who knows
what a poet would come up with.  :-)

> 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".
I get the idea.  :-)  The example I *was* going to use myself was the
morpheme that (depending on the form) means horse, wind, journey, run or
race, but I'm still not sure what verbing "horse" would mean.  Your
example's a lot better!

YHL