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

On Thu, 30 Aug 2001 18:00:03 -0400, Roger Mills <romilly@...> wrote:

>>> Herman Miller wrote:
>>> > Anyone have any cool examples from their langs of interesting gaps
>>> in the vocabulary?
>>-
>
>This is more of a conculture thing, but as I've said before, the Kash have
>no concept comparable to the Judeo-Christian God, neither as Creator of
>their world, nor as its Guardian or Guide.  For the translation relay, I had
>to devise  "shehakinda" 'Earth Spirit'-- that would be similar to Gaia.
I had a similar problem, not having any real equivalent for "Lord". A
hypothetical Judeo-Christian speaker of Czirehlat might use something like
"lerava" ("my god"), or perhaps "lejirax" ("my master") to translate words
like "Lord". But these are inherently possessed nouns, and it would be
ungrammatical to use the bare stems without a possessive prefix. So you'd
end up with "someone's god" or "someone's master" in the title of the relay
text. So I went with the idea of "Great Spirit".

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