Re: Missing the sky

En réponse à Muke Tever <alrivera@...>:

> Hey everybody.
> I havent been around lately, as if anyone noticed ;p
>
I did (or at least I do now :)) ).

>
> Rami can't have a word for "sky".
> The sky is not a thing... it is not a direction, really... I don't think
> it
> can be a verb...  It's just an abstract concept, an idea.
>
> I don't even really know how to translate it.
> What *is* the sky, in concrete terms?
>
Well, in this case having a conculture with your conlang helps a lot. Some
cultures consider the sky to be a kind of lid or cover or roof above earth, and
thus call it that way (or a derivative). Some just have a god of the sky and
name the sky itself after the god. Some separate day sky and night sky (like
supposedly the Proto-Indo-Europeans did) and have different terms for both.

What's important in this case is not what the sky *is*, but what the speakers
of the language *consider* it to be.

> All the circumlocutions I can come up with can't describe the sky in
> general,
> only in part--after things that are in the sky (occasionally) or the
> color
> that the sky is (occasionally).
>
Then why not having different terms for the sky, with one extended to mean "sky
in general" but originally with a specific meaning, and the other ones still
used with their specific meaning?

Of course, if your conlang is supposed to be a philosophical language, none of
those ideas work :)) .

Just one advice when you're stuck by things like that: metaphor or metonymy,
i.e. name a thing after another thing that has some resemblance (even remote,
but enough to make a comparison), or name a thing after one of its components
(which thus takes over for the whole).

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.