Re: Hot, Cold, and Temperature

Nokta Kanto wrote:

>I was in the shower, thinking, "this water needs more temperature"... It
led
>me to wonder how languages name properties that fall on a continuous scale,
>such as hot-cold, long-short, loquatious-breviloquent, etc.
>Esperanto and other logical-leaning languages prefer to define one of the
>directions in terms of its opposite, instead of having separate roots for
>opposites. What about the name for the property, though? Do your languages
>not have such words (can't say "What is its length", have to say "How
(much)
>long is it?"), do they derive from the augmented word (length), or from the
>diminished word (shortness), or from another root altogether (duration)?
>
--------------------
Ithkuil utilizes the third approach, i.e., a stem meaning 'linear spatial
extent or degree' as opposed to 'shortness' or 'length.' To quote from Sec.
10.3 of the Ithkuil grammar:

"Rather than lexicalize such concepts as pairs of binary oppositions,
Ithkuil delineates these qualities as varying points along a continuous
range. In other words, in Ithkuil you do not say 'X is cold and Y is hot',
but rather 'X has less temperature and Y has greater temperature'.
Similarly, one does not say 'A is near to me and B is far from me', but
rather 'the distance from me to A (or proximity of A to me) is less than
the distance from me to B (or proximity of B to me)'. Note that the choice
of translation for the latter stem as either ‘distance’ or ‘proximity’
becomes arbitrary, as the real meaning of the Ithkuil stem is ‘amount of
linear space separating two entities.’ Virtually all Western descriptive
and dimensional oppositions are similarly handled in Ithkuil as mere
variance in the quantity of a single quality, the degree of an attribute,
or the extent along a spatio-temporal range or continuum."

--John Quijada

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