Re: word choice process (was: Announcement Follow-up)
From: | claudio <claudio.soboll@...> |
Date: | Sunday, August 5, 2001, 0:13 |
hi do you have lists
categorizing terms for "mental processes"
im working on this right now, i would be interested.
regards,
c.s.
MT> From: "Wade, Guy" <Guy.Wade@...>
>>Very interesting. How did you come to choose those words? For that
MT> 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.
MT> What I do (for most of these things so far) is go through my little IE roots
MT> book and find any root vaguely related to whatever semantic domain I happen
MT> to be looking for ("color terms", "mental processes", etc.) and make a list
MT> of them (which means I don't have to look for things more than once).
MT> Then when I need a word, I find the closest-meaning one and tweak it to fit
MT> (and the tweaking itself usually adds some pretty odd corners to the
MT> meaning, which ends up as a mix of the source, the target, and whatever
MT> Exciting Possibilities pop into my head for yon word). The emotion word
MT> meanings, though, I did all at once, dissimilating synonyms and tending to
MT> fill what I thought of as gaps in the English range.
MT> The meaning of "iáwós" and its counterpart "shwíros"[1] came from just one
MT> situation, and I just divided it into two different reactions: the first an
MT> uplifting feeling, and the second a kind of fear or respect (as in, perhaps,
MT> "the fear of God").
MT> *Muke!
MT> [1] Identical but not cognate to the word for "wild animal".
"rurmlor entflöt, fluppseveri trimel akre wopel larf."
- alte redensart
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