samālle
one’s heart.
samāca
one’s liver.
In English, the heart is where one feels emotions, particularly love. The liver, not so much. Other cultures do it differently. I have no idea how the Kēleni divide these things up. I would love to know how exactly other cultures and con-cultures view the heart, liver, whatever in terms of emotions and judgment and thoughts.
I want to know three things with respect to the liver:
(1) How do people without surgery ever figure out what the liver is and what it does?
(2) Is the word “liver” related to the word “live”?
(3) Just how on Earth did they figure out that “liver spots” had anything to do with the liver?!
I can sort of answer number one. First, surgery is pretty old. Second, autopsies (even if not formalized with that name) are also old. Third, disembowelling or otherwise taking apart an opponent or a human sacrifice is very old. All of these can lead to knowledge of interior anatomy. As to figuring out what it does – who says they did? It’s a large organ, larger than the heart, I think, and thus must be important and do something important, right? And correlating people who died of X with the fact that their livers all had certain characteristics and people who died of other things did not – that’d be a clue, too.
Well, I guess that explains it… I haven’t done much killing and disemboweling, though, so how was I supposed to get this knowledge? Television?
There certainly is plenty of killing and disemboweling on television. 🙂