Re: Hot, Cold, and Temperature

In the conceptual language I would make if I wasn't so
lazy, I would tranlaste for ex "the water is warm" by
something like:

water temporary-state temperature(4;E5)

where:
- 'water', 'temporary-state' and 'temperature' would
be entries of the lexicon (thus semantically defined,
of course)
- 4 would be number, or value, 4
- E5 would refer to an arbitrary scale, also defined
in the lexicon, like (closed discrete
scale;1,2,3,4,5), meaning five steps, 1 being the
lowest, 5 the highest. Of course I could use another
scale if i wanted it.

To be more precise, I had to add:
- a determiner on 'water'
- a tense + aspect on 'temporary-state' (or to the
whole sentence)
- maybe some more ornaments if needed.

If I wanted to refer to always warm water (geothermic
for ex), I would use sthg like 'intrinsic-property'
instead of 'temporary-state'.

--- Nokta Kanto <red5_2@...> 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. We have a few
> scales where the property gets its own name:
> hot-cold-temperature,
> far-near-distance... while for many, it is derived
> from one of the
> adjectives: long-short-length, strong-weak-strength,
> wrong-right-wrength.
> (Well, it should be a word.)
>
> 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)?
>
> ----
> "Everyone's different, except me." --Noktakanto

=====
Philippe Caquant

"High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs)

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