Re: SURVEY: Idiomatic Expressions In Your ConLang Or ConCulture

On 11/22/05, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:

> FWIW I now, after some thinking around the matter, adhere to Trask's
> definition of 'idiom':
> "An expression consisting of two or more words whose meaning cannot be
> simply predicted from the meanings of its constituent parts."
>
> Thus a single word cannot, by this definition, itself be an idiom.
>
> I think, however, we can talk in terms of whether morphemes used in some
> compound or derived word are used idiomatically or not. ........
So a single word can't be _an idiom_, but might be _idiomatic_.  OK.
This makes sense to describe English usage, but for an engelang
or auxlang one would probably want to have an adjective meaning
"idiomatic", or (in a noun-based engelang) a root morpheme
meaning "idiomaticity", applied to "word" and "phrase" to get:

phrase + idiomatic = En. "idiom" (& "kenning"?)
word (+ compound) + idiomatic = En. "idiomatic compound"
[maybe:]
sentence + idiomatic = En. "proverb", "saying", "expression"...?
those don't quite fit...

I reckon I probably want to add a morpheme to gzb meaning
"idiomaticity", but I'll have to look around and see if I don't
already have something with a close enough meaning already.
Or maybe something meaning more broadly "such that it's
meaning/use/nature cannot be predicted/deduced from its
component parts" -- that might be applied beyond the
domain of language, perhaps.  Can y'all think of concepts
that morpheme of broader meaning would be useful
for deriving?   (It seems close to but not synonymous with
English "synergetic"; I already have an (idiomatic!) compound
meaning "synergetic", "cu-rô" -- system+quality.)

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry