Re: Different words for one thing

Ed Heil <edheil@...> wrote:
>
> Sounds like the same as the "cow/beef" "pig/pork" distinction in
> English!
Well, _pez_ and _pescado_ in Spanish do, though _pescado_ is often
countable (while 'beef' and 'pork' are uncountable in English).
In fact, most people now say _un pescado_ instead _un pez_, and
only purists bother to correct them. For uncountable usage, only
_pescado_ is allowed.

But I was asking about words for the same object or kind of objects,
that one usually would consider identical or not worth making the
difference (from one's Western PoV and language environment); words
that are not related (like _pez_ vs. _pescado_) and don't form
native-borrowed pairs (like 'pig' vs. 'pork'), and that are
interchangeable, grammatically speaking, though not always
semantically.

>
> On the flowing water topic, I vaguely remember hearing that it has
> been theorized that Proto-Indo-European used the same word for
> "living" and for "flowing water," the one being a metaphor for the
> other, though I'm not sure in which direction, and that this lay
> behind the etymology of the Greek word "hygieia," "health."
The same whence comes 'hygiene'?
[reading original Tolkien these days ;)]


--Pablo Flores
  http://draseleq.conlang.org/pablo-david/