Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: noun forms of verbs

From:Kala Tunu <kalatunu@...>
Date:Sunday, November 18, 2001, 9:35
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. :-) ----------------------------------------------- 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.