Re: noun forms of verbs

On Mon, Nov 19, 2001 at 01:44:32PM +0100, Henrik Theiling wrote:
[snip]
> In Tyl-Sjok, which has nouns as the only class of content words,
> `food' can be used as a verb indeed meaning `to eat'.  The reason is
> that Tyl-Sjok has a notion of default actions.  If it is clear what is
> done to a thing, the thing can be used directly as a verb to denote
> the action on that thing.  The full sentence for `I eat' in Tyl-Sjok
> would still be `I ingest food'.  Because `ingest' is the default
> action for `food', you can say `I food', too.
Cool, this is a neat concept. I think I'll borrow this idea in my conlang
:-) Currently, my conlang is languishing under a possible total revamp,
and some difficulties with participles, etc.. This should help some :-)

[snip]
> Other default nouns with default actions:
>     car     to drive
Interesting, reminds me of Mandarin's "che1" (car, or cart, or to drive a
cart).

[snip]
> Default actions are an open concept in Tyl-Sjok, meaning that they
> depend so heavily on context that it is hard to list all
> possibilities.  E.g. if the context is `to repair' (e.g. someone tells
> you they repaired their lawnmower), you are allowed to say:
> `I car, too' to mean `Yeah, and I repaired my car.'
[snip]

Cool! My conlang has a lot of context dependency too. You can basically
leave out any words that are understood by context, including verbs :-)


T

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