Cleverness in vocab #2.2
From: | Roger Mills <romilly@...> |
Date: | Sunday, October 27, 2002, 16:41 |
Nihil Sum wrote:
>YES, I did have a word for "hide and seek"! With a plausible etymology! To
>hide oneself is |surnak|, to find something is |bulmak|. surna-bulma ?
Well,
>a bit of butchery on the former word allows a rhyming name that might have
>been coined by children: |sulmabulma|. I imagine this might back-form into
>words like |sulmabulmak| "to play hide-and-seek"; and |sulmak|, a variant
of
>|surnak| used only in the game: |Sulmye!| "Hide!"
Ha! Great (or perhaps, Childish) Minds Think Alike.....much the same process
produced Kash _furi-finja_ (some time back, too). Furik is 'hide', _minja_
is 'seek, look for everywhere'. f~m is not a regular alternation-- the
sequence usually goes f - p - mb, the reverse is possible too-- but at least
they're both in the labial series.
Actually, *fumbrinja (/fur-minja/)would have been the regular compound form;
*furi-pinja (<furik-minja) a possible one (stop-nasal > stop at the nasal
position), but from there it's a short step to /f/.
How about this game: Let's play tag. You're "it"!
Kash: ará mi/yama-lipa. hat e mesa!
let's we/run-catch. You ART one
(lipa = lipat 'catch, capture'; yama-lipa might be deformed to _yandipá_)