Re: word choice process (was: Announcement Follow-up)

From: "Wade, Guy" <Guy.Wade@...>
>Very interesting.  How did you come to choose those words?  For that
matter,
>how does anyone choose their words?  For me, I try to associate a feeling
>with the word, though I guess in 'real life,' it may be the other way
>around, I don't know.
What I do (for most of these things so far) is go through my little IE roots
book and find any root vaguely related to whatever semantic domain I happen
to be looking for ("color terms", "mental processes", etc.) and make a list
of them (which means I don't have to look for things more than once).

Then when I need a word, I find the closest-meaning one and tweak it to fit
(and the tweaking itself usually adds some pretty odd corners to the
meaning, which ends up as a mix of the source, the target, and whatever
Exciting Possibilities pop into my head for yon word).  The emotion word
meanings, though, I did all at once, dissimilating synonyms and tending to
fill what I thought of as gaps in the English range.

The meaning of "iáwós" and its counterpart "shwíros"[1] came from just one
situation, and I just divided it into two different reactions:  the first an
uplifting feeling, and the second a kind of fear or respect (as in, perhaps,
"the fear of God").


    *Muke!

[1] Identical but not cognate to the word for "wild animal".

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