Re: Words and meanings (creating vocab)

Emaelivpar Chris Wright:
>> And speaking of this, how does everyone else make their vocabularies? I
>> usually do it by translation, since it's fun, if tedious, and the words
>> are instantly useful, or at least used.
T'adáshavpar Jonathan North Washington:
>That's the way I find most efficient.
I also find translating the best way to make new words.  I usually find at
least one category of words that I don't have at all in my language yet,
and so I have to stop and think about how the conculture would deal with
those concepts, not just those words.  I often get sidetracked into making
at least twice as many supporting culture words as words used in the actual
passage.

But I had trouble finding good things to translate.  I've done the Babel
Text and the North Wind and the Sun (which I'm typing into Shoebox now!
The automatic interlinears are _nice_), but I don't know what else to do.
I suppose I could also translate the Lord's Prayer, but even ICly it would
be a translation, since the Cresaeans did not have any concept like the
Christian god until they met Terrans.  (Incidently, the word for God is
|lorán'carn| /lor"AnkArn/, literally "life-energy man," which is how they
understood the concept when it was explained to them.)

What else have you people translated?  If you've done poetry, how do you
handle rhyme/meter/connotations, which poetry tends to rely on much more
heavily than does prose?

>experience, she found that the words she learned in English didn't cary
>the meaning.  They felt flimsy and were just words, whereas in her
>native Polish vocabulary, words were what they meant.  An X was that
>thing, not just a word for it.  Maintaining this connection when
>learning other languages and creating languages can be an interesting
>experience, that I'm afraid many people who learn a language beyond
>their native aren't able to do (or just don't).
I'm a monoglot English speaker.  I took Spanish for 5 years, and I noticed
that the words I'd known since Spanish 1 felt the most "real" -- if someone
said "¿Cómo estás?" to me, I _understood_ it, I didn't just translate it
into English.  The more recent a vocabulary word was to me, the more likely
it was that I'd have to consciously translate the word.  But it is true
that I don't look at a cat (which _is_ a cat, not just labeled a cat), and
don't think that it's also a gato with quite the same force of reality (or
something like that ;) .


--
AA

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