the chinese script

[mvrdrk]

From the sections: introduction, the chinese script

Need definitions for:

• perfective prefix - a prefix that makes things perfect, implies an action begun in the past whose results continue in the present


• inchoative infix - an infix that indicates the beginning of an action or state, but not that something is about to start. Ignoring the infix part, "I've become angry" is "inchoative", but not "I'm about to become angry" or "I am angry".


• participial suffix - a suffix that makes a verb into an adjective to modify a noun (past: verb-ed, present: verb-ing). So participle != gerund. A participle is a verb turned into an adjective but a gerund is a noun-ified (noun-ized?) verb.


• ablaut - a vowel changed to indicate linguistic distinctions ( e.g. a kind of irregular verb: sing/sang/sung. What about goose/geese?)


• word-class - In grammar, a lexical category (also word class, lexical class, or in traditional grammar part of speech) is a linguistic category of words (or more precisely lexical items), which is generally defined by the syntactic or morphological behaviour of the lexical item in question. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_class) That's a completely useless definition, I have no idea what the definition means. I think it means "set of type of words": Nouns is a word class? Verbs is a word class?


• dewlap - Loose skin on the neck under the throat. Eww.

From unit 1:
"a day remembered by all (qualifier is a participle plus a prepositional)"
What is a participle? What is a prepositional? What is the participle, what is the prepositional in remembered by all? ... Oh, I'm reading that as pre-positional and wondering in front of which position, when it's probably preposition-al and I need to figure out what a preposition is. The spouse was laughing at me: it's "indicates position" not location in the sentence. So from flemmings: "by" is the position and it's in front of "all".

Elder child brought home "Rune Factory Frontier" for the Wii. Oh gods, what a time sink! I think I'm hookeddoomed ...