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Finn here. Most of the technically valid declensions of "dog" would never see any actual use, so it's not quite as bad as it seems, but I think you still need t
by chousuke 8y ago
Finn here. Most of the technically valid declensions of "dog" would never see any actual use, so it's not quite as bad as it seems, but I think you still need to count them as individual words because they can't form a valid sentence by themselves.
These noun declensions are not where it ends, though. There are many ways to derive adjectives from nouns and nouns from verbs and verbs from adjectives, so you can generate technically valid new words for quite a long time given just one root.
- klipt 8y ago> These noun declensions are not where it ends, though. There are many ways to derive adjectives from nouns and nouns from verbs and verbs from adjectives, so you can generate technically valid new words for quite a long time given just one root. You have verbs like "dogged" and adverbs "doggedly" in English too.
- est31 8y agoEnglish also has diminuitives. piglet, doggy, etc.
- ajuc 8y agoEnglish diminutives are very rudimentary and irregular compared to inflected languages. In some language you can form several levels of diminutives from any noun. Even stuff that makes no sense, like "cute taxes", "cute death", "cute abstraction", "cute declension". And you can form the opposite - take a noun and create less cute/uglier/larger version of it. And these additional forms still obey the other rules, including declension. So there's a combinatorial explosion of versions of each word.
- Udik 8y ago> Even stuff that makes no sense, like "cute taxes", "cute death", "cute abstraction" A cute abstraction would definitely be my thing. As we would say in Italian, an astrazioncella, or astrazionuccia, or astrazioncelluccia, or astrazioncinuccia, or astrazioncinelluccia. :)
- r-bryan 8y agoWhen learning some Italian I was both dismayed and fascinated to discover that it was necessary to avoid every diminutive ("cute") and augmentative I could think of, because they all carry sexual innuendo.
- Udik 8y ago> they all carry sexual innuendo They don't. Your teacher was a pervert. :)
- ajuc 8y agoAbstrakcja, abstrakcyjka, abstrakcyjeczka, abstrakcyjunia, abstrakcyjeczunia, ... :)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- valiant-comma 8y agoThe Russian word vodka is a diminutive form of voda (water) — in essence, vodka is “cute water”.
- ajuc 8y agoyep, same in Polish. Woda, wódka, wódeczka, wódzia, wódziunia. and then if you don't like drinking you can go the other way: wódka, wóda, wódzicha.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoGenerating adverbs ("doggedly") from adjectives ("doggéd", two syllables) is, as far as I know, absolutely universal among inflectional languages. Adverbs and adjectives are very closely related things. Generating verbs ("dogged", one syllable) from nouns ("dog") is absolutely universal among ALL languages, inflected or no, but is a much less regular process than the adjective-to-adverb derivation, as the relationship between an arbitrary noun and an arbitrary related verb is much less regular than that between an adverb and its matching adjective. English is pretty free in deriving verbs. Latin very obviously has methods of deriving verbs and adjectives from other parts of speech, but those are generally not given any formal grammatical treatment when you study the language -- it's expected that you'll just pick them up by feel.
- Someone 8y ago”English is pretty free in deriving verbs” Or, as Calvin said: “Verbing weirds language” (https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25)
- brian_cloutier 8y agoHuh, I don't think Turkish lets you verb nouns. They've got plenty of ways to turn verbs into nouns but every time I try to make the other way work it just sounds weird. Any chance you know the term in linguistics for verbing things? I want to look it up because you're right that this feels like a natural thing to do, it's surprising that Turkish doesn't allow it.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoDerivation is the term for generating one word from another word. I don't think there's a term for specifically deriving verbs. I did find a paper on Google Scholar purporting to list "derivations producing verbs from nouns" in Turkish, "An Outline of Turkish Morphology" by Oflazer, Göçmen, and Bozşahin.