Derivational morphology

[philena.livejournal.com]

1. How productive are the processes by which nouns become adjectives and verbs become nouns? For example, there are correspondances such as значить--значение, повторить--повторение, изменить--изменение, and so on. If I were to propose a fake verb like зафренить, would you expect the corresponding noun to be зафренение?

2. If you saw a sentence like Я писала хорошему длинное письмо, would you be able to interpret it (however awkwardly) as "I sent a long letter to the good (one)."? For example, would it work in the following dialogue?

--Ты плохому студенту звонилa?
--Нет, я писала хорошему длинное письмо.

Thank you.

Comments

[archaicos.livejournal.com]

This one is fine, it could be exactly what you came up with.
I'm just pointing out that other changes in the words may be necessary.
So, for instance, when we're saying зафрендить, a quite similar thing to your invention (derived from "friend" and means to add as a friend), then it becomes either зафрендивание or зафренживание (like with опереДить->опереЖение). So, we have the ив suffix (which is not always there) and possibly a consonant alteration.

[philena.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, I'm aware of all those frustratingly creative types of derivations Russian has. (Actually, I came up with зафренить because I saw зафрендить somewhere, but I wanted to leave out the consonant alternation, so I used н, which is much safer than д.) Thank you very much for confirming that my invention is at least possible. It is extremely helpful.