En réponse à Muke Tever <alrivera@...>:
> [I hope yall'll forgive that all these replies are together.. I can
> only
> respond through this clunky webmail interface and not Outlook Express
> anymore.. stupid mail servers.]
>
Different experience here :)) . I would never read the list through Outlook
Express (really awful) and my webmail interface works very well :)) .
>
> But it is a very strange thing--it cannot be heard or touched or smelled
> or
> tasted, and its appearance is quite... inconstant? It is possible that
> the
> day's blue sky might be seen as a thing by the Rami, but I am not sure
> that
> any other state might be. Words for spaces.. Words for any spaces at
> all
> might be difficult Rami concepts.
>
How would you translate "landscape" in Rami then? Because it has the same
caracteristics as sky (inconstancy, cannot be touched, etc...). Yet a landscape
is something pretty real! :))
>
> > Some just have a god of the sky and name the sky itself after the
> god.
>
> Well, the Rami have been traditionally nontheistic.
>
Well, even non-theists can have spirits and other kinds of creatures :)) .
> > Some separate day sky and night sky (like supposedly the
> Proto-Indo-Europeans
> > did) and have different terms for both.
>
> There were PIE words for different skies?
>
Yep! The word *dyew- (or is it *dhyew-? I can't remember exactly) refers only
to day-sky (and this word later gave "deus" in Latin: "god"). I don't know what
the word for night-sky was. And though reconstruction of meanings may be a
tricky thing, IEologists seem quite sure of this meaning.
>
> There probably cannot be a "sky in general" word. But perhaps "sky in
> general" could be achieved by a dvandva compound between the day-sky and
> the
> stars.
>
Nice idea!
Christophe.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.