Rodiniye wrote:... it could perhaps be simplified to: a = living (plant/animal), u = non-living, e = nominalization of a verb.
...
eima = someone suffering from pain
eimu = a pain
eime = the act of feeling pain
eimes = suffer/feel pain
Good suggestion, but I do not think people would find that easier. My brother would not know what "nominalization of a verb" is, I think he finds it easier to distinguish between things he can touch or not How is in your example "eimu" and "eime" too different? is "pain" not the process of feeling pain already? Or very similar? Atlas has "eime" for both...
Well, you already use it for nominalization, the difference is that you merge the -u and -e forms so that you don't have to worry about that concrete vs abstract difference. Right now, the -e form is shared with nominalization (ie. for actions, so using a verb as a noun) as well as for abstract nouns like love and ghost. To me it seems clearer to treat love, ghost, and medicine as one type and reserving -e for verbs, but i'm fine with either way, i was just offering a suggestion which i thought might clear things up without really changing the grammar that much. I've already uploaded the roots and recorded the first 300 anyway, so...
arza = doctor
arze = medicine
arzu = drug
With Esperanto, you have a similar suffix system, so you could have:
kuraci = arzes = to treat
kuracado = arze = (the process of) treating, treatment
kuracisto = arza = someone who treats, doctor
kuracilo = arzu = a tool for treating, medicine (though there's also the form "medikamento")
The problem i have with Esperanto is i often have trouble telling whether the root was originally a noun/adjective or a verb, for example kurac- is inherently a verb, dom- inherently a noun. If i want to treat someone, i can "kuraci" them. If i want to make something into a house, though, i have to "domigi" it, not "domi". And there are other subtleties which trip me up from time to time, whether to use -i or -igi, -o or -aĵo or even -ado, and so on.