Re: THEORY: Deriving adjectives from nouns

On 4 Jun 99, at 12:28, Charles wrote:

> Marcos Franco wrote:
>
> > Particularly on that case ("pretty little girl(s)(') school") you have
> > an ambiguity, since it's not clear whether the school is "for girls" or
> > "of the girls".
>
> It is a famous test case. There are many possible meanings.
> How many can your conlang unambiguously distinguish,
> and how intuitive are the constructions?
I think I'll do some work on that.  I suspect that {gzb} can already
handle most of the permutations, but I'll have to do some work to
be sure.


>
> Matthias once gratiously provided this other headache:
> "nice dancer" vs "nicely dancing one". (I cannot
> bring myself to say "nicely dancer"!)
I face an initial difficulty in that I've deliberately not made root words
for subjective qualities (nice, good, pretty), but derive those terms
from words signifying mind-states (moral approval, aesthetic
appreciation, general pleasure, lust, etc.) + a suffix meaning
"inducing this state".  So prym "appreciation of beauty", prym-fwa
"beautiful, inducing a state of appreciation-of-beauty".

So: for "nice" in the English phrases there are two senses, one
applied to the dancing (competent, beautifiully done) and one to the
dancer (pretty, or having a pleasant personality).  For the first I can
use a simple modifier, but for the other I need to specify the
mindstate that the presence of this nice dancer induces in his
companions.


dancer whose person is nice
fliqnx-tla  fax-txox-fwa
dans-isto  am-et-iga
dancer love-(diminutive)-inducing

dancer whose dancing is nice
fliqnx-sunx-tla
bon-dans-isto
dance-competent-professional

> Precision is good, but so is ease of use.
> It seems every word is an encoded sentence.
That's potentially true - depending on what other language you're
glossing a word in, anyway, and how much detail you need.

Jim Henry III
Jim.Henry@pobox.com
http://www.pobox.com/~jim.henry/gzb/gzb.htm
*gjax zaxnq-box baxm-box goq.