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Re: noun forms of verbs

From:Roger Mills <romilly@...>
Date:Sunday, November 18, 2001, 5:32
>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......