Re: McGuffey Readers and animals

Carsten Becker wrote:
> So I downloaded the first McGuffey Reader and skimmed a bit
> through it. What gave me headache is that there are
> frequently mentioned everyday animals. Since the Ayeri are
> supposed to live on another planet, there are of course no
> dogs, cats, duck(ling)s and such per se.
Ah, the perennial problem for those of us who locate our languages on other
planets........

BTW, your orthography is GORGEOUS. (envy, envy) I came up with a lot of
similar chars. before I settled on the Kash alphabet; now I wish I'd been
braver (ease of [me] writing was a consideration, but I suspect Thais don't
have any problem with their system).

But I don't know
> enough about Biology and I can't draw well enough to make
> up own animals of the respective kinds.
Neither do I. :-((( All I know about the Kash/Gwr world is that there are
some large/med/small mammals, large/med/small reptiles ~"lizards" or
saurians (some of which must be warm-blooded since they can live in cold
climates); some mammals and "lizards" can glide and/or fly (no feathered
"birds"); insects of course; fish and perhaps one or two marine amphibians.
So far, names for just a few, esp. the food animals, which have to be
glossed "similar to Terran xxx" (a practice I don't like, but what to do? I
can't make an "Illustrated Dictionary" or Encyclopaedia-- life is short,
after all.......). Also, there are no household pets, or zoos for that
matter-- it's wrong to remove an animal from its natural habitat. The other
night I saw a program on the "Tasmanian Tiger", which apparently still
survives-- a cool looking beast (but I think a marsupial, and I'm not sure
we need those on Cindu. Aren't they sort of an evolutionary dead-end? or
non-competitive?) The idea of egg-laying mammals is fairly intriguing,
however; another dead-end, no?

of the continents of a
> map of Areca I drew "pre-last" summer. -- At least my
> drawing skills are good enough to hand-draw a map.
Let us see them, please, if possible.

But
> better don't ask me to reproduce parts of it by hand. Even
> with checkered paper this is a hard job for me.
C'mon, ain't that hard...and Xerox machines nowadays can increase/decrease
sizes...though I haven't tried making a really big wall map.  Best for that
would be to draw a grid. (There must be a way using a bitmap at BIG
magnification, which could be printed out; even when it's reduced to
"normal" size it looks pretty good, though all that carefully inserted
detail is lost.)