Re: R: Re: New to the list

On Fri, 13 Oct 2000, Adam Walker wrote:

> Which brings me to an ob/conlang: how do you say I'm X years old in your
> conlang, and does that mean that you have had X anniversaries of your
> birthdate (as in English) or that you have lived in all or part of X number
> of years (as in Chinese).  Do you count from birth, conception or some other
> event?
Haven't done the word for "year" yet, isn't that silly?  But you don't
use "year" per se anyway in Chevraqis, you use the season you were born
in, and add a year for time spent in the womb (Chevraqis-speakers are
human, and they round the 9 mos. up to a year).

Probably you'd say something like "I have 14 summers," though I'm still
figuring out how to express "to have" (probably going to use the verb
"to exist" instead of creating a new verb).  This would only count the
summers you'd lived through, plus the womb-time.

By that reckoning, I suppose I have 22 winters.  :-)

In Korean, you're 1 year old on the first New Year's Day after you're
born (counting womb-time, sort of), and thereafter you add a year for
each New Year's Day (that's the Chinese/lunar New Year, BTW, which is
also why I'm a Year of the Horse person even though I was born in 1979).
Or so my mom says.  Frankly, anytime my relatives asked for my "Korean
age" (or rather, "non-American age") my mom would have to do the
calculation for me.  I can't keep more than one age straight in my head!

YHL