Re: Degrees of adjectives

Staving Muke Tever:
>Peter Bleackley <Peter.Bleackley@...> wrote:
>>I'm NOMAIL at the moment, so please reply to this personally.
>>
>>Are there standard linguistic terms for degrees of adjectives that express
>>"less" and "least"?
>
>Do they even occur in natl-- (ahaha, silly question.  of course
>they have to, somewhere).
>
>Well, I don't know of any standard terms.  But this is CONLANG, so
>I won't be daunted from making some up :p
>
>(given) X is adj          (positive)
>         X is adjer than Z (comparative)
>         X is adjest       (superlative)
>
>(say)   Z is not adj         (negative, most likely)
>         Z is less adj than X (anticomparative?[1])
>         Z is least adj       (antisuperlative?)
>
>On an etymological level, the "opposite" of |comparative| would
>be *|separative|--"compare" being literally to bring together [such
>as for the purpose of comparison], and of |superlative|, *|sublative|,
>but that's perhaps a little silly.
>
I quite like "anticomparative" and "antisuperlative". For the record, I'd
been using "diminutive" and "minimative" in my descriptions of
Khangaþyagon, but I was wondering if a standard term existed. Surprisingly,
the SIL glossary doesn't even have an entry for degree.

Pete

Replies