Re: THEORY: Deriving adjectives from nouns

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?
>
> 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?).

> 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
like an implicit denial of any interrelationship between those species, which
is clearly wrong, because all animals are obviously more closely related
both to other animals and to every animal in some fashion or another.
You could go even further, saying that there is a specific name for every
entity, or a name for every atom... you see where this is leading.

The same thing goes for the grammar.  To encode every possible shade
of verbal mode, for example, into verbs by some system would seem to
deny any interrelationship between those modes.  "Desiring" and "wishing"
certainly seem similar to me.  But moreover, why can't you define a specific
mode that means "wanting to do something while you are in your car becoming
irritated by traffic" (or something absurd like that)?  Not only do those
examples clearly seem, to me at any rate, to have certain underlying
relationships, just like animals are underlyingly related to one another, but
there is, a priori, no end to the kind of complexity you would have to have
to have complete disambiguation of all forms.

So, the Golden Mean seems here to be the best rule to follow when
considering how much you want to build into your language.  (What
exactly that is, of course, is your personal choice, which is what makes
it all the more fun, no?)

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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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