Re: THEORY: Deriving adjectives from nouns

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...).

>> 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.=20



Saludos,
Marcos