Re: Verbal nouns

> 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)
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
proto-language there was no POS distinction at all in the lexicon,
although syntactically there were verb-like and noun-like functions.  Over
time some noun class markers fused with the nouns to form the basis for
current Yivrindil nouns, and these were taken as the bases from which all
new verbs were derived.  Thus, in current Yivrindil the base lexicon per
se contains only nouns, with all verbs being very simply derived from
nouns.

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?

> 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.

> 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