Re: liking (was: Re: Have a nice day, and other things...)

Nik Taylor wrote:
> There are several suspicious pairs in Watakassí, like [hyphens added
> only to make the root clear, not actually written] wa-náu/láu (piece of
> fruit/eat), wa-saní/pi-taní (house/inhabited place).  There is a prefix
> n(a)- which means "that which/one who", or occasionally "that which
> is/one who is" (i.e., passive), so náu is often thought of as being
> short for n-láu (that which is eaten).  However, there's no evidence
> that this is the case; wanáu goes back to Common Kassí, when na- meant
> "person associated with" (later came to mean "one who", then finally
> "one who, that which" - and now _tai-_ (related to su-takí, person) is
> the normal prefix for "one who").  In fact, I think that the Common
> Kassí had greater differences between the two; something like láqu vs.
> náhu, or something like that, I don't have the etymologies with me.
>
> However, the saní/taní correspondance is not so easily dismissed.  The
> similarities go back to Common Kassí; it is may be that the two are
> related, perhaps connected with pre-Kassí dialectal variations)
I have been interested in seeing how much of a Proto-luna I could
reconstruct from the similar words I find in ea-luna.
(Surprisingly, many of these pairs came up after I adopted a more
random method for vocabulary generation.)

The first case I noticed in ea-luna is teme-temi-temu which mean
"mill"-"merchandise" or "goods"-"greedy" respectively. The -e,
-i, and -u endings are meaningless, but I suspect that there is a
common ancestor to these words, and perhaps that final vowel is
related to a set of intermediate words that shared the "tem-"
root. There are several other examples like this.

I sometimes get the feeling that ea-luna underwent some sort of
great upheaval, in which someone or some group of people may have
purposely re-engineered it from an earlier form for unknown
reasons. I wonder why they would have done that... hmmm...
something for me to "discover".



--

Mia (tuozin@dmv.com)