Re: noun forms of verbs
| From: | Roger Mills <romilly@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, November 18, 2001, 5:32 |
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>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......