Re: Noun and noun or noun

> At 10:07 AM 5/20/99 +0200, Joshua Shinavier <Ajshinav@...> wrote:
> >>Sylvia Sotomayor wrote:
> >> Maintaining a collective plural gets to be interesting when dealing with
> >> abstract nouns, and I would tell you more, but I haven't worked it all out
> >> yet.
> >
> >I'd be interested to hear what you've got so far.  Arove"n tends to shy away
> >from plurals for abstract topics.  For instance, two "thoughts" together are
> >also a thought, singular, although a more complex one; if they are thought
> >separately or deliberately kept apart in some way then you use the plurals.
> >
> Well, one thought was to turn them into actions. One feature of Kelen is
> that it doesn't have the grammatical category of verb. But, semantically,
> there are still a number of action words. When I was much younger, I read
> too many books on Zen for Westerners, and I still vaguely remember this
> concept of a 'thing-event'. So, when trying to figure out what a collective
> plural could be, this concept came back to me. I'm not sure if Kelen is
> actually going to do this, but, in the meantime, here are some possible
> examples:
>
> ja soun = a thought
> ne soun = many thoughts
> an soun = thinking, or maybe the conscious mind. hmmm.
In Aroven (the name means "language of thought", btw. :) thoughts are
distinct from thinking.  A "thought", as a dynamic phenomenon in the human
brain, does by definition exist without thinking, but a "thought" in the
idea sense, as I think you meant it above, is independent of the brain or
body and so from thinking.  The question of whether a "thought" exists in the
brain or not is irrelevant, as "ayd" (as it is called in Aroven), does not
"exist" (endo) at all.


> ja ra = a step
> ne ra = many steps
> an ra = motion, movement, going
This would be a more direct transformation :)


> ja kiuw = a touch, a tap
> ne kiuw = many taps
> an kiuw = touching, feeling, etc.
So an kiuw has to do with the "experience" of touching?  That might be
interesting.

JJS