Re: THEORY: Deriving adjectives from nouns

Tem Sat, 5 Jun 1999 22:08:57 -0500, Tom Wier
<artabanos@...> skribis:


>> >adjective suffix, as in "homely" and such (because "nice" is already
>> >an adjective, and why do you need to adjectivalize what is already
>> >an adjective?).
>>
>> However, it's possible to derive an adjective from an adverb (e.g.
>> Esperanto nuna, chiama...).
>
>Okay, but that doesn't make an adverb + noun, in any language,
>any more comprehensible, does it?  I know I kinda jumped into
>the middle of things here.
Of course, adverb + noun is, as you said, an impossible pair, if we
define adverb as "a word which modifies verbs/adjs/advs". However,
there is a kind of adverbs, derived from verbs, which we use ruling
noun phrases. You've just seen one, they are gerunds:
We use them ruling noun phrases.

We can consider gerunds as verbal adverbs as well as we consider
participles as verbal adjectives. In fact, in Esperanto they both are
constructed with the respective ending -e and -a :
la legho regante homojn funkcias bone,=20
la legho reganta homojn,=20
(where homojn is the object of reg-).

>> I think your mistaking here the meaning of the word "ambiguous".
>> "Animal" is IMO not an ambiguous word, but a generic one. You can
>> precisely define what an animal is ("organic being that lives, etc.")
>> so this word be unambiguous, without having to refer to just one
>> concrete being in the world.
>
>But what exactly do we mean by "ambiguity", then?  To me, ambiguity
>implies that a term or phrase could have multiple possible =
interpretations
>or meanings. What, exactly, without defining in circles, is an "animal"?
Just look in a dictionary.

>Are fungi animals?  Are plants animals? By the definition given above, =
they are.

Please note that my definition was conciously incomplete (hence the
"etc.").

>So you see, the problem is not so easy. There are multiple possible =
definitions
>in actual use for the word.
Perhaps in English "animal" has more than one meaning (I don't know),
but a loglang would have just one of them (the main one, I guess).

>The whole idea of genericness would be lost if it were defined in any =
specific
>way: generic concepts are fundamentally ambiguous.  "animal" can refer =
to
>any number of possible lifeforms that share certain characteristics with=
 one
>another. Similarly, the Hungarian third person pronoun <o"k> for example=
 is
>ambiguous as to the gender it conveys (there *is* no gendered pronoun,
>IIRC). This is an example of genericness in action, and yet it's also =
obviously
>an ambiguity.
=46ollowing your arguments, no noun may be unambiguous in a language
(except, perhaps, proper nouns). If you say, "a chair", then you're
being ambiguous, because, no matter how precisely you define what is a
chair, there are millions of chairs in the world.=20


Saludos,
Marcos