8 Replies to “annēla”

  1. I love colors! My very first language was a triconsonantal root language, and I had an entire pattern devoted to colors, so that every root could become a color. I had easily more than 100: Things could be water-colored, brick-colored, zebra-colored, stone-colored, happy-colored, etc.

    My suggestion for a new topic: Animals! ~:D

  2. Thanks. The only problem I have with animals is that I still have not figured out TÄ“rjemaran biology, nor the biology of whatever the home planet is. So while I have some words for various animals, they are mostly in response to translations.

  3. Ok, that takes care of one of my suggestions for a possible next direction, and I’m kind of glad because “animals” would not have helped much with “things I can use where English would use verbs”, which is a big part of learning KÄ“len 🙂

    So, my other thoughts included:

    1. activities of daily life
    – advantage: hypothetically, we could talk about our day! 🙂

    2. words about the body and using the body

    3. motion words

    Really, it’s kind of interesting how food-related words constitute such a HUGE and also clearly delineated segment of human languages 🙂

  4. Good point about food, Amanda. There are some languages in the world that have terms for immediate family members only, while everyone else is merely a “relative”. There are no languages, though, that have words for a few basic foods, labeling the rest “food”, or something similar.

  5. 2 I can do easily, and it even lends itself to eventually doing 3. So, I think when I am finished with color terms, I will start on body words.

  6. About large segments of speech: I thought of another one potentially as big as food, yet more highly variable as being far more culturally dependent. Occupations/roles/statuses are a group of words every culture must have, but are more human-internal and less about interfacing with the outside world unless your culture only supports direct land-facing roles.

    Another interesting class of words is made artifacts and ways of making things, but that seems to me more nebulous, or maybe just orthogonal to usage-related ways of dividing semantic space (i.e. some artifacts are also food-related words). Some cultures are vastly richer in artifact words than others, especially ones that have invented brand names 😉 (When reading a Mohawk-written introductory Mohawk book/tape, I read the claim that Mohawk was much less interested in naming objects because it places less value on possessions. In support of this, English could have whole dictionaries of words for clothing items, but Mohawk clothing names translate as “it covers the trunk”, “it covers the feet” etc., so no room for subtleties of shirt vs. blouse, coat vs. jacket, tights vs. pants….)

  7. Oh, neat. I didn’t know that about Mohawk. I have some idea of possessions, but not a lot, though I do have a fairly rich category for materials, especially minerals, mostly because chemistry is the same everywhere.

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