Re: noun forms of verbs

nicole dobrowolski wrote:
> my question is: would it be valid to say that "food" is a
noun form of
> the verb "to eat"?
In English, if I understand your question correctly, I'd say
no, because
"food" and "eat" are unrelated words.  However, you
certainly could use
the verb "eat" to mean "food" in a language that allows
that.  English
does that with the related "drink", after all.  :-)
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like in indonesian: makan "to eat" > makanan "food" ; minum
"to drink" > minuman "drink" (n), "beverage"
this kind of "nominalizing/verbalizing" exercise is a lot
conlanging fun :-)
i can't resist writing here my (lengthy--i'm
sorry!) conlanging recipe to derive nouns form verbs an vice
versa. i derive words from one root by referring to a set of
actors
taking part in a same "activity". i can increase or decrease
the number of actors and get the field of activity larger or
narrower. for instance, i can pick first the situation where
someone eats something. then the food is considered a mere
patient (sp. "la comeda"). if i add the purpose of
sustaining biological life then the food is considered a
utility to
feed oneself or an instrument to feed someone else (fr. "la
nourriture"). but i could also consider it at the same time
as a patient, a utility and an instrument and call it a
"consumable". this means that i would chose to consider it
from its own viewpoint as well as from the viewpoints of the
eater and of the one feeding. if i consider the frame of
time of the activity, then i get a pattern (meal), a process
(le nourissage) etc. i often refer to the tables made by
french semanticians Bernard Pottier and Vincent
Nyckees. they call the state, relation or activity a
"behaviour" (comportement) and they insist on the
"direction" of a comportement, that is to say whether the
comportement is considered as having or lacking a purpose,
then whether it's considered from a "prospective" viewpoint
(i.e. as a cause) or from a "retrospective" viewpoint (i.e.
as a result). and there is finally the viewpoint of each
actor toward each other actor.
for instance, "to sleep" is a pattern lacking a goal, while
"to rest" is a pattern that may have either purpose and/or a
result. in English "to break" is a behaviour that
prospectively always infers that an actor will "be broken".
that's why other languages chose to derive "to break" from
the state of being broken as indonesian pecah >
memecah(kan). it's not merely a question of aspect, but of
whether i chose to name the behaviour as a resulting pattern
or as a process pattern. in other words, whether i chose to
stand at the point where it's broken and you look back
(retrospectively) to the origin of the damage or else
whether i chose to stand at the origin and prospectively
contemplate what will predictably result. whether a
behaviour extends to a result depends on my set of actors.
in "to
break" there can be many actors: the one broken before it
breaks, the one broken after it breaks, each pieces of the
broken one, the breakings, the one breaking it, the one
having broken, etc. i can change their numbers as i wish.
but usually i would make a set of "core actors" and extend
it to "peripheral" actors: maybe the instrument of breaking,
the place, the time, etc. and then i can view the pattern
from each of these actors. and of course i can create a word
for an instrument with a specific breaking purpose and a
word for "shards" and derive "to break" form such
specialized words. i find it very interesting that for many
of us the discussion often revolves around what noun is the
"right nominal form" of a verb. i believe that this must
make sense in some way.
um... yeah, that's a looooong post for not much.