Re: THEORY: Deriving adjectives from nouns

Marcos Franco wrote:

> Tem Sat, 5 Jun 1999 02:58:19 -0500, Tom Wier
> <artabanos@...> skribis:
>
> >> Matthias once gratiously provided this other headache:
> >> "nice dancer" vs "nicely dancing one". (I cannot
> >> bring myself to say "nicely dancer"!)
> >
> >"Nicely dancer" makes no sense to me.  The -ly suffix there,
> >for me, could only be an adverbial usage, not the derivational
> >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.

> >> Precision is good, but so is ease of use.
> >> It seems every word is an encoded sentence.
> >
> >I don't think it's so much a matter of ease of use, as that a certain
> >level of ambiguity is actually desirable in a language.  Aside from the
> >fact that *no* ambiguity imposes what I believe to be a false dichotomy
> >on reality, it's practicly important to be able to convet concepts which are
> >inherently ambiguous.  So, having a lexicon with no general word for
> >"animal", but thousands of individual words for individual species, seems
>
> 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"?
Are fungi animals?  Are plants animals? By the definition given above, they are.
So you see, the problem is not so easy. There are multiple possible definitions
in actual use for the word.

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.

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704
<http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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