Re: The nature of birds and conlangs

On Fri, 25 Jun 1999 16:11:45 +0200 Irina Rempt-Drijfhout
<ira@...> writes:
>On Thu, 24 Jun 1999, Nik Taylor wrote:
>> Interesting how "worship at night" mutated to "worship in the
>evening",
>> and then back to night, and how stars came to be sky, and then stars
>> again!
>It even became "early evening", "dusk" for a while, while Valdyan
>_havin_ absolutely means "night", when it's completely dark.
>
>   Irina
The Rokbeigalmki word i used, _vih~t_ /vI::t/ (/I/ = barred-i), means
"the time the stars appear", and is the beginning of true night, about a
little bit more than an hour after sunset.  It doesn't literally mean
"the time the stars appear", it's an intensified form of the verb-noun
_viht_ /vIt/, "appearance".

The "stars" to "sky" shift was probably my fault, though. :)
I used _eleni_, "dome (of stars)" to translate "stars".  It's a borrowing
from Proto-Elvish, where it actually means "stars".  It couldn't
supersede the native Rokbeigalmki word _gamnuhm_, so _eleni_ became the
collective word for the starry night sky, and from there acquired also
the meaning of a plain "dome".


-Stephen (Steg)

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