Re: 'out-' affix in conlangs?

On Fri, 8 Aug 2008 17:53:52 -0400, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...> wrote:

>On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 5:23 PM, Alex Fink <000024@...> wrote:
>
> Though in practice E-o adjectives derived from substantial
>roots are not
>often ambiguous in context, I think.  Still, for practical use I prefer a
>language where the derivations are a little too vague and occasionally
>ambiguous to one where you can't derive words easily and you have
>to memorize apparently unrelated words for closely related concepts.
[...]
>> Basically, you simply need to specify more for a
>> derivational operation than e.g. "converts nouns to verbs".
>
>Indeed it helps reduce ambiguity to do so, though given how well
>Esperanto (and even Toki Pona) work in practice, I'd hesitate to
>say you *need* to do so.  I would strongly recommend doing so
>in an auxlang or engelang; in an alien lang or more or less
>naturalistic  artlang, do whatever you like.
Point.  In my fretting about the conversions not in general being uniform I
wasn't allowing for just accepting the unspecifiedness of the operation,
which on second thought is a very naturalistic thing to do, especially if
different e.g. nouns can have different semantics of e.g. their
adjectivisations sanctioned by usage.

>> At the extreme, I suppose, you might have a language where one of these
>> categories (e.g. verbs, or adjectives, I think I've read of cases of both)
>> is a _closed class_, i.e. you can simply never make any more of them,
>> whether by derivation or borrowing or some other means.
>
>That is interesting.  What cases have you read of each?  There
>was talk here about Basque verbs recently, a certain subclass of which
>are a closed class as I understand it, but it has an open class of
>verbs as well, doesn't it?
It does.  I'm not actually sure why the standard analysis of Basque calls
both of these word classes verbs, aside from the fact that the class in
other languages each of them is most like is the verb.  As far as I can see
you could analyse Basque as having a closed class of syntheticverbs and an
open class of periphrasticverbs.  Or is there some problem with this analysis?

AFMCL I took a kinda hedging position on this question in A:jat he-Heloun
whose verbal system shows the influence of Basque on this point; I have
"s-verbs" and "p-verbs".
  http://000024.org/conlang/AhH/05-11.html , heading "Verbs"
except my server is down.

I don't remember a more clear-cut case of verbs being a closed class
offhand, except that I think Australia has several.  Chris Bates would
probably know one.

Adjectives, you're in luck.  I've got a Tlingit grammar here
  http://www2.hawaii.edu/~crippen/papers/tlingit-gram.pdf
which says in chapter 7 that the "noun-like adjectives" are a closed class,
only eleven existing.  It says the "verb-like adjectives" are an open class,
but S7.2 seems to say that these aren't adjectives at all but rather stative
verbs.  So I'm willing to call this an example.

Alex