Re: You have a word for it?

On Saturday 26 January 2002 17:34, Nik Taylor wrote:
> William Annis wrote:
> >         That's interesting.  In classical Greek, xenos has the
> > same meaning.  It seems best to take the meaning as "participant
> > in a relationship of xenia."
>
> It reminds me of the difference between, e.g., Japanese
> _oniisan/otouto_ (big brother/little brother) and English "brother"
> and the Hawaiian word (I forget the form) that means "sibling of
> the opposite sex".
Kélen does this, too. matié is a sibling of the same gender, and
makája is a sibling of the opposite gender.

Aside from the usual culture-laden words, there are these...

Words for 'beautiful'. Someone is maxóLa if they are pleasant to look
at. máNeren is reserved for heart-stopping or awe-inspiring beauty.
Then there is makóráLa, which describes specifically male beauty.
With an inanimate prefix (jakóráLa), it could describe the desert and
other places that are beautiful and dangerous.

annára, the concept that you are but an event in process, and thus
the sum of everything that has come before you and necessarily a part
of everything that comes after you. As a class noun, anannárien is
short-hand for what I cynically describe as "The Underlying
Perversity of the Universe", i.e. it's not random, it's out to get
you personally.

On Saturday 26 January 2002 21:46, Nik Taylor also wrote:
> Also, in post-Classical times, sunistuu (person of the same
> village) was used metaphorically for a person with common interests
I like that shift in meaning. I may do something similar in Kélen.

--
Sylvia Sotomayor
sylvia1@ix.netcom.com

The Kélen language can be found at:
http://home.netcom.com/~sylvia1/Kelen/kelen.html

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