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Just as we can verbify the idea of a quality in such cases as “reddens,” so we can represent a quality or an action to ourselves as a thing. We speak of “the height of a building” or “the fall of an apple” quite as though these ideas were parallel to “the roof of a building” or “the skin of an apple,” forgetting that the nouns (height, fall) have not ceased to indicate a quality and an act when we have made them speak with the accent of mere objects. And just as there are languages that make verbs of the great mass of adjectives, so there are others that make nouns of them. In Chinook, as we have seen, “the big table” is “the-table its-bigness”; in Tibetan the same idea may be expressed by “the table of bigness,” very much as we may say “a man of wealth” instead of “a rich man.” 去书内
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  • 用户870568 用户870568

    就像我们可以将表示性质的词语动词化，比如用“变红”一词，我们也能把某种性质或动作在脑海里视作具体事物。我们会说起“建筑物的高度”或是“苹果的坠落”，仿佛这些概念和“建筑物的屋顶”“苹果的果皮”属于同一类，却忽略了即便把**高度**、**坠落**这类名词当作具象事物来表述，它们本质依旧指向一种性质和一个动作。正如有些语言会把绝大多数形容词转化为动词，也有另一些语言会将形容词转化为名词。前文提到，奇努克语里，“大桌子”会表述为“桌子 其之大”；藏语中对应的表达则是“大之桌子”，这和我们用“富有之人”替代“富人”的表达方式十分相似。

    2026-06-10 喜欢(0) 回复(0)

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