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Re: Missing the sky

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Wednesday, March 6, 2002, 14:02
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.