Re: 'out-' affix in conlangs?

On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 5:23 PM, Alex Fink <000024@...> wrote:

> 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.
> 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'.
Or "made of X" or "resembling, savoring of X" (though there's also
the more specific "-eca" for that), or "for the benefit of X"
or "suitable for X" or "originating from X"...   Issues  like these
were why I came up  with the set of adjective-deriving suffixes I did
for gzb.   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.

I think the derivations in the other direction, from adjective to noun
or verb to noun, are much less problematic (at least w.r.t. Esperanto);
you can be pretty confident that the basic meaning of such a
nominalization will be "quality X in the abstract, x-ness" or
"an instance/act of doing X" -- though in some cases 120 years
of unregulated usage have given some such nominalizations
additional conventional meanings.

> 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".
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.

> 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.
And of those that have productive derivational morphology, some
tend strongly toward zero-derivation (English and Toki Pona,
for instance), some mark the derivations vaguely
(most of the derivational affixes being semantically broad;
Volapuk is more extreme about this than
Esperanto, and my understanding is that Ido's derivation system
is supposedly one of the areas where it improves on Esperanto,
but it's still vaguer than an ideal engelang) and some do so with
rather more semantic precision (Ithkuil; my gzb, I hope).

> 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?

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/fluency-survey.html
Conlang fluency survey -- there's still time to participate before
I analyze the results and write the article