[Lexicog] boring question

[Conor Quinn]

Dia dhaoibh, a chairde!

Well, I have noted that Indonesian-speaking students of English have an
extremely difficult time consistently distinguishing "boring" from "bored",
despite the fact that standard Indonesian at least clearly distinguishes

bosan 'bored'

from

membosankan 'boring'

There's your related pair: mem- being the so-called "active voice" prefix, -kan
being an applicative/causative.

Interestingly, "boring" also is a fairly popular loanword in colloquial speech,
but evidently mostly used with the meaning of standard "bosan".  For example:

Gue lagi bosen sih, karena....
I'm bored, because....

The interesting thing here is that *lagi* is something like a progressive aspect
marker, so perhaps the use of bor-*ing* rather than bore*-d* has to do with some
overgeneralizations in the mapping.  It could, of course, just be (and perhaps
more likely be) that the term was borrowed whole hog, indifferently to its
source-language morphology, but then as such, reanalyzed to parallel the
nearest local equivalent, namely, bosan 'bored'.

Incidentally, heretofore, I'd never heard anybody speaking Indonesian use the
colloquial morphological equivalent of membosankan, i.e., ngebosenin, and was
starting to think there might be something to that.  But conveniently I'm here
for a wedding, and was just able to confirm that that usage is quite possible.
A good reminder never to trust one's own warped impressions.  Of course now I'm
wondering if it's only used with an animate/human agent, and not of, say, a
film or book.  Such is lexicography, eh: always just that one more question to
ask.

Hope this is useful; till later, keep well.

Sla/n,
bhur gcara

Quoting Melissa Axelrod <axelrod at unm.edu>:

> Hi all-
>   I'm interested in the relationships between sentences like 'I'm bored'
> and 'It's boring (to me)'. Are these two sentences possible with
> inflectionally related words in other languages as well? Also, I'm
> interested in semantic extensions of 'boring'. In ASL, the sign can mean
> not only 'bored/boring' but also 'yuck', 'no way' and 'I refuse to do
> that'. Is that common in other languages as well?
>   Thanks,
>   Melissa
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> Yahoo! Groups Links
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