tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Feb 09 03:58:10 1994
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Adams Family Motto:
- From: [email protected] (Mark E. Shoulson)
- Subject: Adams Family Motto:
- Date: Wed, 9 Feb 1994 16:56:45 -0500
- In-Reply-To: Will Martin's message of Wed, 9 Feb 94 13:53:14 EST <[email protected]>
>From: Will Martin <[email protected]>
>Date: Wed, 9 Feb 94 13:53:14 EST
>On Feb 9, 11:53am, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
>charghwI'vo':
>> >Sorry, Nick. You can't nominalize a verb and then use a verb suffix on
>> >it...
>> >{legh} is a verb. {leghwI'} is a noun. {leghwI'laH} is a non-word...
>~markvo':
>> Sorry, charghwI', but Nick's right. His compound is ok. You missed
>> another meaning of "laH". It isn't just a verb-suffix; it's also a noun in
>> its own right, meaning "ability". So "leghwI'laH" is a compound word of
>> "leghwI'" plus "laH", meaning "seer's ability" (noun-noun construction,
>> in one compound word, like jolpa')
>I do not feel bad for "missing" this one. If THAT were his intent, it
>would be much more clearly stated as a noun-noun construction than as a
>compound word. A simple space would have made the meaning much more clear.
Maybe so; I probably would have used a space myself. I rarely coin
compounds.
>I also have never fully agreed with your theory that there is no
>semantic difference between a noun-noun construction and a compound noun. In
>{jolpa'}, I believe that the relationship between {jol} and {pa'} is one of
>association, though not of possession and THAT is the kind of relationship
>between nouns that I see as justifiable for new (not in canon) compound
>nouns. When possession is the only relationship between the nouns, I think it
>is much clearer to use the noun-noun construction without losing the space
>between the nouns. There are examples of exceptions, like {SermanyuQ}, but I
>genuinely believe that these are exceptions and not the rule.
I don't know. I think I still believe what I said. Looking at it the
otherway, we have plenty of examples for noun-noun constructions with a
space that do not imply possession. "peQ chem" for magnetic field. Does
magnetism "possess" the field? "tuj muvwI'" (thermo-suture from veS QonoS
list): does the "muvwI'"/joiner "possess" heat? These aer merely
association. Examples in the direction you're looking at are too rare for
me really to bring them up. We really don't have all that many compound
nouns in the canon.
>Otherwise, we might as well say you can use any noun as a noun suffix,
>and {laH}, the noun becomes {-laH} the noun suffix. This is not pretty. After
>looking at {leghwI'laH} again, I feel as strong as ever that it is a
>non-word. If it were written as {leghwI' laH}, it would be a somewhat
>unattractive, but acceptable noun-noun construction. I would REALLY like to
>not see us consider this to be license to use {-laH} as a noun suffix without
>something from Okrand indicating approval.
Depends how you look at it. Using nouns as noun suffixes? That's an
unpleasant way to put it. But we know that you *can* compound nouns
together, so in some sense, even when they're separated by a space, you're
still using one noun as a "sufffix" to another, if you insist on looking at
it that way. I recently coined "lengHuch" for "fare" in the sense of the
money you pay to travel via some conveyance. I think it works. Does that
make "Huch" a "noun suffix"? We've seen "jolpa'" "puchpa'" and "vutpa'"
(the last all the more interesting since so far as we know "vut" is just a
verb); does that make "pa'" a noun suffix? We have "QongDaq" for "bed", is
that doing anything illegal with the noun "Daq"? These are just
garden-variety compounds.
>charghwI'
~mark