Re: Tiki vocabulary

Jim Henry wrote:

>
> Did English of ~1900 have a word for the concept we now call "coolness"?
> If not, there's no particular reason an auxlang developed at the time
> would have it either (unless it did exist in some other of Tiki's
> source languages).
The question is whether French (or the author's native language if it
wasn't French) had a word for it. Or more generally, how they would
express the same reaction with the words they had. Something with a more
Latin feel, like "extraordinary" or "magnificent"?

   I reckon the easiest solution is, as you suggest,
> to say that the Tiki you present is a slight modification of the original
> Tiki, made in the 1990s or early 20th century of this alternate history;
> thus "kulu", "jaki" etc.  To explain "jaki" you would need to posit some
> mildly unwieldy word for "dirty" in the original Tiki; or perhaps "jaki"
> was added as a poetic alternative with additional connotations
> ("disgusting", "reprehensible", "despicable"...?) -- like some
> Esperanto words such as "povra" for "malricxa/kompatinda".
The Tiki word "jaki" actually doesn't correspond with "dirty" (which is
"puku"), but more generally "disgusting, revolting". I can imagine a
number of options for that.

> Neither Volapük nor Esperanto nor, as far as I know, any other early
> auxlang had self-segregating morphology; all of them had problems
> like the one you describe to some extent (it was pretty bad in
> the original Volapük; Arie de Jong's 1931 revision fixed some
> specific ambiguities but didn't solve the underlying problem).
> So in short, Tiki would be a typical late 19th/early 20th century
> auxlang if you leave these ambiguities alone.
Certainly a suffixing language seems more in character with a language
of that era, especially one inspired by Volapük. (And my original idea
for compounds would also make sense in a Volapük-inspired language:
Volapük "world language" vs. pük vola "a language of the world").