On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 14:04, Benct Philip Jonsson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> Indonesian can have zero-derivation in
>> colloquial speech-- surat can mean 'to write'
>> or 'a letter', cinta 'love' can be noun or
>> verb; but correctly, when used as verbs there
>> ought to be a verbal prefix... I really suspect
>> not many languages can do this as readily as
>> English does. (German/Dutch and Romance lgs.
>> come to mind).
>
> Swedish certainly can't. In order to use a word as
> a verb you have to put a verbal ending on it, and
> only the closed class of strong verbs have any
> zero endings within their paradigm.

Similarly in German.

I imagine pretty much any noun can be verbed by tacking on -en, but
you would need an extra morpheme.

>> Sort of OT, but relevant to the question about
>> Basque verbs-- IIRC the verbs that have their
>> own synthetic conjugation (i.e. without the
>> usual person+tense aux.) are a small and closed
>> class, I think mostly intransitive. There's
>> another productive (I think) class formed from
>> NOUN + 'to do/make' (egin?); one that has stuck
>> in my mind is 'to sneeze' (sneeze + egin? +
>> aux). (My Basque grammar is one of the books in
>> storage.......)
>
> The Semitic component of Yiddish vocabulary works
> similarly IIRC, using a Semitic verbal noun + a
> Germanic verb like 'be, have, do' rather than
> tacking Germanic endings to Semitic verbs.

ISTR having read about the word "geganvet", meaning "stolen" and
written gimel-`ayin-gimel-nun-bet-`ayin-tet, i.e. ge-gnb-et, with a
Germanic prefix and suffix and a Semitic triliteral root -- spelled as
in the original, rather than phonetically -- in the middle. (I've no
idea how representative that is, though.)

Cheers,
-- 
Philip Newton <[log in to unmask]>