Re: Tiki vocabulary

On 4/8/06, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
>
> But I also wanted an entry
> for the other meaning of "cool" ("awesome", "rad", "wicked") in English,
> which isn't easy to find a non-English equivalent for in dictionaries.
> And this is especially tricky if Tiki was created in the late 1800's -
> early 1900's! Could it be a modern invention, created by a recent
> English-speaking Tiki enthusiast to fill a gap in the vocabulary? But
> why didn't the original vocabulary have a suitable word then?
The slang meaning for "cool" of "calm" and...well, you know, "cool",
was in use even in the 1800s. It didn't acquire the ejaculatory sense
("awesome!") it now also has until later, but there were equivalents,
though I can't think of any at the moment. :-) In ilomi (and this is
quite by natural evolution through participation of other ilomi
enthusiasts, not any forethought on my part), the word for the colour
'black' has come to have the slang meaning of "cool" as in "with-it",
"calm", "in the know". Presumably the etymology would trace back to an
equating of 'black' with 'quiet, calm, steady'.

> But then a 3-syllable word ending in -ba could be
> misinterpreted; "maliba" (marimba) could be analyzed as "mali-ba"
> (likely to be a husband?). Different stress patterns might help, but
> with both suffixes and prefixes in the language, I'd need to distinguish
> between the three possibilities "ma-liba", "mali-ba", and "maliba"
> somehow. Perhaps all suffixes could be two-syllable roots ("beke-bale"
> for "fragile").
>
Unless you are going to really institute self-segregating morphology,
I would recommend that you just go with a plausible and consistent
stress rule, which will help, and accept that sometimes it's going to
be ambiguous.

---larry

Reply