Re: noun forms of verbs

In a message dated 11/18/01 8:37:38 PM, laokou@MSN.COM writes:

>From: "nicole dobrowolski"
>
>> question is: would it be valid to say that "food" is a noun form of
>> the verb "to eat"?
>
>I don't see why not. As others have pointed out, there is the word "eats",
>referring to food. I personally don't see it as archaic, I didn't realize
>it
>was an Americanism, and while my travel experiences within the 48 have
>been
>almost exclusively limited to the great state of New England, I consider
>it
>current usage, albeit rather "down home" (I mostly use it for humorous
>effect, usually as "good eats" [which almost never are]).
>
>Still, if *I* were you, I'd wanna to come up with some synonyms, too  mainly
>because I think things will start doubling up, and I, personally, hate
>expressions like "dance a dance", "dream a dream", "walk a walk", etc.
>(there's a word for these).
My syntax teacher called them "cognate objects." He mentioned very briefly
and vaguely that in certain West African langs you can't just say "I danced"
or "I dreamt" - there's some kind of marker you have to add on to indicate
that the object is the same as the the verb ... or you know, something like
that. It was funny to hear that cause I'd thought about doing the exact same
thing for Eloshtan, though it didn't happen in the end.

>Case in point, in Géarthnuns, the word for "play" is "íönsel"; the word
>for
>"game" is "íönsels". Now if you think I'm going to allow an expression
>like
>"sí íönselsít íönsel" for "play a game" in *my* lang, you've got another
>thing coming. To get around it, you say "sí íönselsíts dravnath" (lit:
>"make
>a game"), and allow "íönsel" with specific game names. There are other
>instances where this sort of thing crops up (which escape me now), and
>similar circumlocutions have been devised (I don't want "dravnath"
>["do/make"] to be the catch-all default, but it *is* handy).
That's something like what Eloshtan does now. I neglected to make a word for
game, but there is the word "toy" - "file." The word for "play," "filefefy,"
comes from that word plus "do." It is absolutely impossible to say "file
filefemt" ("a toy, I played with"), because the verb is intransitive - it
already has an object IN it. If, say, the word for
"game" were "vyehi," you couldn't say "vyehi filefemt", because that would
mean "I played with a toy a game" - you have to use a special postposition
"ho," which you could take to mean "but it's" ... so it would be "vyehi hoc
filefemt" - "I played with a toy - BUT it was actually a game."

>So, if expressions like "eat eats" don't make you squeamish, then go for
>it.
>
>Kou
Josh Roth
http://members.aol.com/fuscian/eloshtan.html