Re: antonyms: regretful & tasty

Quoting Garrett Jones <conlang@...>:

> i was going through my wordlist for Minyeva, making antonyms for words that
> didn't have any yet. I came across a couple words that i wanted antonyms
> for, but i realized that no suitable simple english antonyms existed, that
> were a simple/common root:
    This is a common problem with dictionaries, and not limited to just
antonyms. Russian, for instance, doesn't have any words that easily map
to "cute" or "fun." There are words that will do (for instance, "khoroshinkij"
for a cute baby), but the semantic range that is present in English is not
there in Russian. Likewise, Russian's favorite command, "davaj/davajtje" can
be translated as "Come on!" "Give me..." or "Let's..." Or "molodjets," another
favorite word, is ackwardly translated as "fine fellow." The best solution is
to do what you did below, i.e., give lots of examples to give a flavor of the
semantic range.
    If you like, you can also create a synonym/antonym dictionary as well,
just to make it clearer; it's common practice to append a list of words
divided by category, such as kinship terms, plants and animals, household
items, etc, so a synonym/antonym section would fit in nicely.

> tasty vs. bad-tasting?
> - plusa = tasty, delicious, yummy (plenty of words)
> - kakco = bad-tasting, unsavory (no suitable simple words here)
    I like "kakco"! How do you pronounce the "c"? I think the reason I like it
is it's close similarities to "caco-" (Greek "kakos", "bad").
    :Peter

Replies