man and woman
door Kalantir, 15 mei 2011
Berichten: 49
Taal: English
Kalantir (Profiel tonen) 15 mei 2011 01:11:37
RiotNrrd (Profiel tonen) 15 mei 2011 01:20:51
Kalantir:... does malviro work as an alternative word for woman? Or can mal not be attached to nouns?MAL can definitely be attached to nouns. MALVIRO is sometimes used in a humorous fashion for WOMAN, but it is not a standard usage.
3rdblade (Profiel tonen) 15 mei 2011 02:09:05
Kalantir:So viro means man and virino means woman. However, the prefix mal makes words into their opposites. In that case, does malviro work as an alternative word for woman? Or can mal not be attached to nouns?I've seen 'malina' a couple of times, (including at this very website) and not just by English speakers who see its similarity to the English word 'male'.
johmue (Profiel tonen) 15 mei 2011 08:06:32
Kalantir:So viro means man and virino means woman. However, the prefix mal makes words into their opposites. In that case, does malviro work as an alternative word for woman? Or can mal not be attached to nouns?mal- can be attatched to nouns. It can be attatched to any word actually. However in many cases (like viro) it is not obvious what the meaning of the resulting mal-word would be.
For example "viro" means "male adult person". Applying mal- to it which attribute is to be altered? "male" or "adult"? Or even both of them? Is "malviro" to be "woman" or "child" or "boy" or "girl".
I once came across the word "malaĉeti". A beginner did not know the verb "vendi" and therefore helped himself out with "malaĉeti". It's ok to do that IMO. It's then the job of the experienced speaker to explain that there is "vendi" and "malaĉeti" is ambiguous.
ceigered (Profiel tonen) 15 mei 2011 08:44:48
.Similarly, Malino sounds like it could be a man or a boy, or something far stranger (well, I guess we men are a bit odd).
I just say "viro" and "ino" personally, although I do use "virino" if I'm speaking more traiditionally, while "ino" is more "transhuman" IMHO.
darkweasel (Profiel tonen) 15 mei 2011 09:22:55
RiotNrrd (Profiel tonen) 15 mei 2011 23:40:19
Seems like a perfectly fine word to me, and adequately describes something I have done on occasion.
La gizmo rompiĝis tuj, do mi malaĉetis ĝin.
I can see how one might say that selling could also be considered the opposite of buying something, so why can't MALAĈETI mean that, too? I would hazard, because there is already a commonly used word for selling, VENDI, and that frees up MALAĈETI for the "other opposite".
Technically MALAĈETI would be a subset of VENDI, since in both cases you are exchanging something for money; VENDI very generally, MALAĈETI much more specifically.
ceigered (Profiel tonen) 16 mei 2011 07:50:25
Cancel a sale, retreat from a venture of sorts?
3rdblade (Profiel tonen) 16 mei 2011 08:23:46
ceigered:Now... what would "malvendi" mean?I believe it means 'to require (something) to be mauve.'
Cancel a sale, retreat from a venture of sorts?
Nah, just kidding. When I started out EO one of the first things I learned was that 'mal' makes something its logical opposite, and it was a plus because it meant there were fewer words to learn for vocabulary. If I heard 'malvendi' in a conversation that was not about painting the walls of a dentist's waiting room, I'd presume the person was talking about 'buy' and didn't know 'aĉeti'.
Once I used 'mallabori' in a conversation because I didn't know the word for vacation, i.e. the opposite of work. Listener looked at me a bit oddly, then said, "ah, 'ferii'.
Mustelvulpo (Profiel tonen) 16 mei 2011 11:29:19