Re: They _don't_ have a word for it!

On Tue, Aug 28, 2001 at 09:22:13PM -0400, Herman Miller wrote:
[snip]
> What I'd like to start is an "anti-vocabulary" list for my languages -- a
> list of words and concepts that have no direct equivalent in the language.
[snip]

I think this is a COOL interesting area to think about in conlangs :-)

> Anyone have any cool examples from their langs of interesting gaps in the
> vocabulary?
Hmmmmm.... *thinks hard*

Well, in my conlang/conworld, there's no such concept as a "sea" or
"ocean". There is something similar to a "river", but not quite in the way
we think of it. This is mainly because of the con-physics in the conworld,
which resembles the real world but decidedly different. There *are* no
large bodies of liquid in that universe... liquids are transient -- it's
practically impossible to gather a large enough volume of liquid in one
place without having most of it either "evaporate" into another form or
"solidifying" into less-than-fluid forms very quickly.

So although one can drink, one can't practically store liquids for long
periods of time without special equipment too inconvenient to carry around
(and too inaccessible to "normal people"). There are "fountains", though,
which isn't a water fountain as we would think; but these are phenomena in
the con-universe that provide an (almost) constant supply of liquid. The
larger "fountains" may be more accurately thought of as volcanoes or
volcano-like phenomena, since they can be quite destructive; the smaller
"fountains" are often very valuable resources to own.

Similarly, the concept of "fire" is a bit different from the real world --
it may very well be that the source of a "fire" is a small but
particularly concentrated "fountain" :-) (yes, liquids "evaporate" into a
form that is probably most appropriately considered as "fire" in our
terms). And therefore, "fire" might be translated anywhere from "hot
matter" to "energetic outburst" to "boiled water". :-)

There's probably a lot more that relates to the conculture, not so much
the alternate-universe setting, but I'll save that for another time :-)


T

--
Don't modify spaghetti code unless you can eat the consequences.