Re: Verbing Nouns

["Wayne J. Douglass" <wayned -at- VERITY -dot- COM>]

At 03:01 PM 2/26/97 GMT, John Kohl wrote:
>
>In the above paragraph, I suppose you could translate "Mondayed" into
>German as "habe...gemontagt".  But "coffeed" would have to be something
>like "gekaffeet," which looks very odd and is nearly unpronounceable
>because I believe the "roots" of German past participles always end in
>consonants, not vowels.  There -are- prefixes in German that change root
>words from one part of speech to another, but sometimes those prefixes
>also change the meaning of the root word somewhat.  (e.g., the prefix
>"ver-")
>
Interesting that German is less "flexible" in some ways than English, even
though English derives from German. German and English do share the ability
to string together words to form a kind of compound noun. In English the
words usually remain separated (for example, "tire tread depth gauge"), but
in German they are usually squashed together (for example,
"arbeitslosefursorge" - not sure of that spelling).

--Wayne Douglass

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