Re: Pet names

Hi Dana,

On Sun, 21 May 2006, Dana Nutter wrote:
>
> While we are on the subject of names, I was just wondering if anyone has
> used any interesting conlang words to name any of their pets?
Does a "conword" count? Although, tempted, I never created any more vocab at the
time ... But early in 1973, we were visited at home in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia,
by a very hungry, beautiful, big black dog. As he seemed to have no home, we
eventually adopted him. At the time, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Filipinas had
just adopted a joint spelling reform, "Mafilindo". Two by-products of this were
that the English- and Dutch-derived spellings of C and S were replaced as
follows:

En./My. "ch" = Du./Id. "tj" ---> uniformly "c"
En./My. "sh" = Du./Id. "sj" ---> uniformly "sy"

(Presumably the previous Filipino spelling had followed a Spanish model?)

Anyway, I was busy at the time getting used to the new spelling, and was rather
fascinated by some of the cross-linguistic puns that it created. When naming
the dog, I simply created another (weak) pun of my own, and called him "Cusy!"
(which we'd write in English, perhaps, as "Choosh!") This is not, AFAIK, a
proper word in Malay, but I used it to represent the speed with which he rushed
by, especially for food (think "Whoosh!") An intermediate En.-My.
pronunciation, tho, might make him "Choosy" - which he was most definitely not
;-).

He was a lovely dog, fiercely loyal to and protective of us, tho he did wander.
In the three months we had him, he put on plenty of weight and grew very
robust. One night he came home for tea with a length of pink plastic twine tied
around his neck - someone had tried to keep him. We kept him locked in for a
week. But in the end we had to let him get some exercise, so let him out again.
He never came back; I'm pretty sure he fed some family quite well ... :-( Still
miss him at times.

Regards,
Yahya


--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.392 / Virus Database: 268.6.0/341 - Release Date: 16/5/06