Water

This thread has inspired me to "discover" that the word for "water" in
Hwendaaru is _ilyoushu_ [Il'jo:Su].  (This is the citation form, the
definite singular nominative.)  I thought the [lj] and [S] sounded kind of
liquid and flowing.  I almost decided to change it when I realized that the
[o:S] makes it sound sort of like "ocean", but then I decided that I should
stick by my inspiration (I don't get very many of them).  After all,
coincidences do happen between natlangs!

Hwendaaru doesn't make any interesting lexical distinctions for water, like
hot vs. cold or wild vs. tame, but there is one interesting thing to say
about it. Because _ilyoushu_ is a mass noun rather than a count noun, it
can't take plural marking, but, like all mass nouns in Hwendaaru, it has a
singulative form _ilyoushiku_ [Il'jo:Siku], meaning a discrete unit or
quantity of water (depending on the context, it might mean a glass of water,
a drop of water, or whatever), which _is_ a count noun and therefore does
have a plural form _ilyoushiki_ [Il'jo:Siki].
-------------------------------------------------
Tim Smith
timsmith@global2000.net

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."
-- The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939)