Re: Hildegard's List

On Thu, 25 Mar 1999, Nik Taylor wrote:

> Irina Rempt wrote:
> > _Nane_ "mother", _inane_ "parents" (dual of the preceding)
>
> Interesting, so does you conlang have a female default?
Only for this word. Descent is matrilineal (probably with the
underlying thought that you can be sure who your mother is, but not
who your father is). Valdyan doesn't mark gender except for
third-person pronouns. If you want to say explicitly that the smith
is a man or a woman, you have to use _tylan ense_ "smith man" or
_tylan lyase_ "smith woman", but usually it's just _tylan_ because
nobody minds about the smith's gender as long as (s)he does a good
job. All professions are open to both men and women, except midwifery
and the Temple of Naigha (women only).

> > _idach_ "guts" (dual of_dach_ "stomach")
>
> Interesting use of the dual.
>
> > _nove_ "woman's breast", _inove_ "bosom" (there's also the poetic
> > _isam_, meaning "two fruits")
>
> Interesting.  "Two fruits" for "bosom"?  I like that.  Is i- the prefix
> for dual in all nouns?
Yes; for pronouns as well. The dual of nouns is obsolete, and the
prefix is no longer productive. Dual nouns usually have a fixed
meaning that can be *very* different from "two somethings": _dayen_
"the element water", _idain_ "water in nature", and the dual is so
divorced from its original dual meaning that it's acquired a plural
of its own: _idaini_ "sea". (This is a collective plural, that
declines a little differently and usually refers to a group of
things, rather than a number of individual things: _rhin_ "ship",
_rhini_ "ships" as a normal plural and "fleet" as a collective plural
- the nominative form happens to be the same).

> > _nus_ "back" (an animal's back is _pol_ "top")
>
> Very logical!
In fact I had _pol_ first when writing about someone riding a dragon,
when I realized that the *human* back is hardly ever on top :-) Then
I derived _nus_ from a family of words meaning things like "behind".

> > sickness: _mudh_ "healthy", _mudha_ "to heal", "to get better",
> > _mudhan_ "doctor", _muzhen_ "medicine"
>
> Are these all related?
Of course. The stem is /muD/ "health", -a is a verbal (infinitive)
suffix, -an is a suffix indicating agent (cf. _tyl_ "iron", _tylan_
"smith"), -sen comes from _sein_ "thing" and derives nouns (muD-sen
-> muZen).

(I don't speak ASCII-IPA yet, but D is meant as the th in "this" and
Z as the z in "azure")

   Irina


               ira@rempt.xs4all.nl (mailing list address)
                     irina@rempt.xs4all.nl (myself)
     http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/frontpage.html (English)
    http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/backpage.html (Nederlands)