Re: 'out-' affix in conlangs?

On Fri, 8 Aug 2008 12:58:47 +0200, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:

> Hi!
>
> Does anyone have an affix in their conlang that corresponds more or
> less directly to the English prefix 'out-' as in transitive verbs as
> 'outperform', 'outsell', etc.?
>
> It would be a nice feature if a language had this a the only way to
> form comparisons, especially languages where advectives are verbs.  So
> you would say ,Jim outtalls John'.  ANADEW?
Lojban comes to mind as doing something similar.  I recall that the
idiomatic way to form comparatives is by what in standard terminology are I
suppose predicate-predicate compounds, the first with the sense 'be Adj' and
the second either _zmadu_ 'exceed' or, what is it, _mleca_ 'be less than'.
Here we go:
  http://jbotcan.org/cllc/c12/s15.html
So you could take an example like (15.3) there,
    mi citmau do lo nanca be li xa
    I am-younger-than you by-years the-number six.
    I am six years younger than you.
and gloss _citmau_ as _cit-mau_ young-outdo.

Mind, I don't actually know Lojban.

On Fri, 8 Aug 2008 20:14:05 +0200, M. Czapp <0zu149@...> wrote:

>*HIJACK: Is there a better linguistic term for the ease with which you can
>change whether a word is a noun, adjective or a verb? The best example for
>weak typing (easy/implicite changes) might be Esperanto, German is of the
>languages I know the one with the most problematic 'typecasts.
Talk of casting tends to make me leery, for the way it seems to make the
background assumption that given any two data types there should be exactly
one function between them of such paramouncy that it makes sense to elevate
it above all others and crown it the Cast between those two types.  For some
type-pairs I buy this (smaller to larger floating point types, say); mostly not.

This seems as  much to be true of lexical categories as computerish data
types.  So in Esperanto the "casts" to adjectives are in fact ambiguous
between roughly "pertaining to X" and "having lots of X" or perhaps other
things yet: _suna_ 'solar' or 'sunny'; _denta_ 'dental' or 'toothy'.   Not
to mention the whole _broso_ vs. _kombo, kombilo_ thing ('brush'; 'act of
combing', 'comb').  Basically, you simply need to specify more for a
derivational operation than e.g. "converts nouns to verbs".

Anyway, to get back to your original question, I don't know of any such
terminology pertaining to changing word class in particular.  One could just
talk of the general propensity for derivation -- some langs might be rich in
productive derivational morphology, others poor.

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.

Alex

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