[534] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: De-verbal nouns
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Sat Apr 10 12:38:23 1993
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Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: Captain Krankor <krankor@codex.prds.cdx.mot.com>
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Sat, 10 Apr 93 10:41:48 -0400
Ken says:
>Until a rule is revealed to us, all such presumption is dangerous.
Absolutely. But at the same time, the presence of the info we *are* given,
(that many verbs can be used as nouns, but it is unknown if all can) certainly
seems like license to try. I got this sense even more strongly when I talked
briefly with Dr. Okrand about it once. It is dangerous, so we should tread
carefully, but I think we none the less can tread.
>We should not be too surprised if the semantic relationship between the verb
>and the deverbal nominal is not completely transparanet. We should also not b
e
>surprised to find that some verbs nominalize in this way and others just don't
>Derivational morphology is typically idiosyncratic
[typos above are my own, I don't have an automatic includer]
While it would not be surprising if we ultimately learned that some
nouns-from-verbs were nontransparent and idiosyncratic, at present I
do not believe that we have any examples of idiosyncratic ones. To my
knowledge, all defined (i.e. explicitly in the dictionary) examples of
noun/verb pairs are the obvious pairings one would expect. This observation
is at the core of the guidelines I presented earlier. Can anyone find any
counter-examples? Until we find such, I think we have to proceed on the
assumption that they will behave regularly.
As for the idea that some verbs just don't have noun counterparts and that's
that, we should probably expect that that is in fact the case. The wording
of the section on -ghach seems to be trying hard to leave open that possibility
