Re: Evolving shades of meaning (was Re: LUNATIC again)

On Sun, 8 Nov 1998 00:18:11 -0500, Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...> wrote:

>Interesting method.  I may have to use that.  In my first project I did
>that on accident.  I'd forget that I had created a word for something,
>so I'd recreate it, later I'd assign variations to that.  Such
>differences aren't hard for me.  What's harder is lumping words together
>in a logical way, i.e., deciding which distinctions made in English to
>get rid of, and, even harder still, to completely redraw the semantic
>borders.  My favorite example from W. is la'u/kapati'.  La'u and kapati'
>both can be translated as "eat, drink, smoke, etc.".  They involve the
>in-take of any substance thru the mouth.  La'u is used in social
>settings (eating and drinking with a community, for example), while
>kapati' is used in non-social settings (an exile eating, for example, or
>an animal eating).  I have other examples of that, where two or three
>words will fail to make a distinction made in English, while
>incorporating a distinction which English ignores.
That was also one of the design goals of Jarrda, and one that had at =
least
moderate success. Jarrda doesn't distinguish "square" from "rectangular",
for instance, but the usage of "square" to mean "two-dimensional" (as in
"square foot" or "square meter") is translated instead with the same word
that means "flat, planar". But I've still got a long way to go....