Dear Terry,
Please allow me to differ on the matter of nouns and verbs with respect to the word “design.”
You wrote:
“It demonstrates how the *design* (noun) referring to the drawings for manufacture is characteristically and historically more common, and hence more important, than the verb form (designing) or the occupation ‘designer’ which seem absent from any discussions at the time.”
This is incorrect.
The noun form of the word design is “design,” either general, “a design,” or specific, “the design.” The noun form of the word also occurs in the plural, general “designs” or specific “the designs.”
The verb form of the word design is “to design.”
The word “designing” may either be a gerund (noun), a participle (verb), or the simple present tense of a verb.
Two short definitions of a noun from Merriam-Webster’s are, “a word that is the name of something (such as a person, animal, place, thing, quality, idea, or action) and is typically used in a sentence as subject or object of a verb or as object of a preposition” and “any member of a class of words that typically can be combined with determiners to serve as the subject of a verb, can be interpreted as singular or plural, can be replaced with a pronoun, and refer to an entity, quality, state, action, or concept.”
Merriam-Webster’s provides these short definitions of a verb: “a word (such as jump, think, happen, or exist ) that is usually one of the main parts of a sentence and that expresses an action, an occurrence, or a state of being” and “a word that characteristically is the grammatical center of a predicate and expresses an act, occurrence, or mode of being, that in various languages is inflected for agreement with the subject, for tense, for voice, for mood, or for aspect, and that typically has rather full descriptive meaning and characterizing quality but is sometimes nearly devoid of these especially when used as an auxiliary or linking verb.”
Determining whether the word “design” occurs more often in English over any historical period requires historical research.
It is a fact that the verb “to design” occurs first in the English language. The first use of the word “design” appears in written English in 1548 as a verb. The noun appears four decades later, in 1588.
The verb form takes historical precedence and it seems to occur more often in historical usage. Without doing a true study, there is no way to know, but Google Ngram shows many more occurrences for the term “to design” than for the term “a design.” Searching for occurrences of the words “designing” or “designs” would not be useful, as both words occur as verbs and nouns, depending on context. Both “to design” and “a design” seem to occur more often than the word “designer.” I would expect this, however, as people in many professions design, while the designated professional labelled as a designer is relatively recent in historical terms.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Elsevier in Cooperation with Tongji University Press | Launching in 2015
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology ||| Adjunct Professor | School of Creative Arts | James Cook University | Townsville, Australia ||| Visiting Professor | UTS Business School | University of Technology Sydney University | Sydney, Australia
Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
Telephone: International +46 480 51514 — In Sweden (0) 480 51514 — iPhone: International +46 727 003 218 — In Sweden (0) 727 003 218
—
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|