Re: noun forms of verbs

ugly words1?!?!?!? Indeed not! Although, I don't know how they're pronounced, but
the orthography is quite aesthetically pleasing...but of course, I don't think
Cellar Door is the be all and end all of beautiful words, like someone we all
know did.

Elliott


In a message dated Sun, 18 Nov 2001 12:34:39 AM Eastern Standard Time, Roger
Mills <romilly@...> writes:

> >In a message dated 11/17/01 12:46:34 PM, fuzzybluemonkeys@YAHOO.COM writes:
> >
> >>ok suppose you take the verb "to sleep"... one way to turn it into a
> >>noun would be "sleeper" or "sleepers" referring to someone who sleeps
> >>but you could also use sleep as a noun as in "i didn't get any
> >>sleep"... there are other verbs that this works for as well but my
> >>question is: would it be valid to say that "food" is a noun form of
> >>the verb "to eat"?
>
> Semantically yes, formally of course not.  But that's because Engl. no
> longer has very many productive derivations, of the sort sing/song,
> speak/speech, dead/death or food/feed, which was mentioned.  Then there's
> love/love, drink/drink etc which show no derivation whatever, and is more
> common.
>
> Malay/Indonesian however has very transparent derivations:  makan 'eat',
> makan/an 'food'; nyanyi 'sing', nyanyi/an 'song' (ugly words, these); the
> pattern works for most verbs.  And of course Kash......