Re: Cheap, shallow and super: French deficiencies

Trebor Jung wrote:

> Merhaba!
>
> All languages are different, so of course they are going to have lexical
> 'deficiencies', but that's how language is, and it hinges only on one's L1.
> Quechua has a single word <llunk'uy>, meaning 'to clean the plate and lick
> the fingers', and if a Quechua speaker learns English, they probably wonder,
> 'Why doesn't English have this word?'. Yet we English speakers will find it
> odd that Quechua has such a word at all: 'When would one ever use it?'.
> Also, see
> http://home.bluemarble.net/~langmin/2and1.htm
>
> --Trebor
>
That page has some nice examples. I don't think I would've thought of
having distinct words for "inside corner" and "outside corner", for
instance. But that got me to thinking about corners, and why we don't
have a difference between "the corner of a room, where two walls
intersect" (more precisely, an edge) and "the corner of a room, where
two walls meet the ceiling or the floor" (a vertex). Geometrically,
these are very different things, but it could be useful to think of
rooms as two-dimensional floor plans with an actual corner where the
walls meet on the diagram as seen from above. In an abstract sense,
there's a similarity between both kinds of corners, in the same way that
"space" can be used informally for either area or volume. And since
there's not much need to refer to the actual vertices of rooms, we don't
have a distinct word for them ("vertex" is a technical term, and only
used to describe the corners of rooms if you're working with 3-D
modeling programs).

There's actually a third meaning of "return", in addition to the
difference between "come back" and "go back"; it can also mean "send (or
give) back". These two meanings are distinct in Tirelat, for instance:
"come or go back" is "nuka", and "give back" is "tiru". In Jarda, "go
back" is "trran" and "send back" is "poel"; in Zharranh they're "vilti"
and "vuli". To me, at least, this distinction seems more fundamental
than "come back" vs. "go back".

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