Re: Verbal nouns

On Mon, 2 Oct 2000, Mario Bonassin wrote:

> I have a verb 'to vomit' and its being used as a noun as in 'the vomit
> is on my shoe' should it be conjugated like a noun, or just have an
> affix signifying its a noun, or would it be conjugated like a verb then
> a noun.  I'm looking for common ways of doing it.
I suppose it would depend on the language, which isn't a particularly
helpful.  I think Korean uses a gerund-like construction but I could be
completely wrong.  And we haven't gotten to this in German <G> but as far
as I can tell, you can turn verbs into nouns and they *look* like they're
usually assigned the neuter gender  after the infinitive-ending -en is
stripped, but someone who knows more about German would have to tell you.

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.

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)

A related noun (triconsonantal morphology) is:
nabasa: shame (given in voluntary actor case--this is how I list nouns
for convenience)

In the translation of "Shame is painful," nabasa would appear as is.

But if you wanted to "verb" the noun, e.g. "You shamed me," you would say:

Sjar naía nabasas

in which nabasa is conjugated in the present reportive.

This doesn't work or make much sense for every noun I have, but I'm
working on metaphorical or poetic usages...eventually.  :-)

YHL