Shalom everybody!
Just couldn't help putting my penny into the discussion...
----- Original Message -----
From: Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Thursday, March 07, 2002 12:42 PM
Subject: Re: Missing the sky
> 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 :)) .
Yep, tastes differ... It's through the Outlook Express that I mostly prefer
to scope the List...
:-))
> > 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.
> >
Just an annotated passage from the book "Semantical Illusions and
Paradoxes":
::: The words in IE langs for 'sky' can be derived from words with the
following meanings: 'stone dome', 'cloud', 'water', 'to strike', 'to
broke', 'bright', 'dark', 'high' :::
> Nice idea!
>
> Christophe.
Yitzik
~~~~~~~~~~~~~