Re: Reply to Sarah's condensed message

Sally Caves wrote:
> > spring                  zhoshra
> > seagull                 zhoskei
> > universe, cosmos                zhoslka
> > library                 zhosllei
>
> Hmmm.  Yes, but Teonaht started out like this, too.  It means you like the
> sound "zhos."  I liked the sound "ilz."  Eventually, I made it a root, but
> there are still not enough basic roots in Teonaht, because so much of it was
> engendered in its "salad days."  You could invent some extremely broad
> meaning for zhos, so old that it has lost its meaning.  Perhaps zhos has
> several meanings.  For the first three, it could mean "sky."  for library,
> it could mean "book."  Vaguely related to "sky."  <G>
Or just coincidence, perhaps from the collapse of several phonemes.
Maybe the first three were Zhos- and the last one was Jos- (assuming
there's no /dZ/ in the modern language)

> > mother, father, sister, brother, man, woman, wife, husband, home, drink,
> > food, love, life, hope
>
> Why these words in particular?  (I'm asking these questions not having read
> through all of the other questions posed by other participants.  Sorry!)
> These would all seem to fit into one category of noun:  family/hearth words.
Which could represent an archaic inflectional system.  :-)  Perhaps the
original language had several declensions, and most of them merged with
one class, but the family/hearth class resisted assimilation.

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