Re: antonyms: regretful & tasty

From: "Peter Clark" <peter-clark@...>
> On Friday 09 May 2003 10:18 am, Garrett Jones wrote:
> > it's interesting to hear of words that english doesn't have good
> > translations for. I want Minyeva to have lots of words like that, but
> > somehow i have to "discover" them on my own or in other languages. Any
> > suggestions on how to find them in other languages? About the only thing i
> > can think of is for people to just list the ones they know...
>
>         This is undoubtably the hardest parts of conlanging, because it
requires you
> to think outside your usual frame of reference. The best thing is to browse
> dictionaries and see what interesting concepts you can unearth there. Also,
> think about semantic ranges.
One thing I find useful (as a predominantly a-posteriori conlanger) is finding
unique specializations or generalizations of what may be perfectly ordinary
roots.  Try adding productive suffixes to words and see if you can come up with
something unique that follows logically.

Another good thing is just looking at things the culture in question might want
a word for.  These arent the best examples at all, but:

Ibran has an acronym _kfet_ /k@"fEt/ which means a place, vendor, or machine
that serves coffee and tea (café e thé = /kA"fE E tE/ = K F E T)

The Kirumb word <nistron> /"nIstrUN/ refers to a magical artifact that returns
(<nirici> /nIrI"tSI/) the user to the user's home.

Ñalonsa (Trentish) has a word <enk'a> "a row of teeth", from which are derived
common words like "teeth", "bite", "chew"...

Henaudute has distinct words for all four grandparents (khoda-, bû-, thêmi-,
têma-), but only one word to cover nieces, nephews, and grandchildren (pekh-).

    *Muke!
--
http://www.frath.net/

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