CONLANG Digest - 5 Feb 2000 to 6 Feb 2000 (#2000-38)

>Date:    Sun, 6 Feb 2000 18:51:30 -0500
>From:    Paul Bennett <paulnkathy@...>
>
>(Is there, therefore, a people so practical that they never discuss things
>that do not exist???)
Or, perhaps, there may be a people so mystical that they believe all things
exist, and nothing (except perhaps the fundamentally impossible) fails to
exist.

Indeed, there may be a place where this is true >;)


>Date:    Sun, 6 Feb 2000 19:30:27 -0800
>From:    Barry Garcia <Barry_Garcia@...>
>
>paulnkathy@earthlink.net writes:
>>
>>I maybe haven't been paying attention as much as I should, but are you
>>saying that W. and Saalangal lack a simple equivalent to the verb "exist"?
>
>No, there is a verb for "to exist" which is what I could have used
>alternately (I used "to happen"). However, there is no verb "to be",
>meaning no copula.
Same in my translation, only I used something more like "to become".


>Date:    Sun, 6 Feb 2000 22:14:07 -0600
>From:    Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
>Subject: Re: TRANS: something slightly more deep (was: TRANS: flutes)
>
>
>In Tirelat, I didn't yet have words for "God", "be", or "light". Clearly,
>the absence of "light" is just an oversight that I hadn't got around to
>needing yet, and it would have been easy enough to just make up new words
>for all three concepts. But then I got to thinking that one of the more
>interesting things about conlangs is not only the unique words they have
>(like "tezn", a transparent plastic ball for small animals like gerbils to
>run around in), but also the deliberate *gaps* in their vocabularies.
Yupyup, I was thinking about this recently... what words should and shouldn't
go into the language probably depends on the ideas its speakers hold, and what
kind of things they notice.

(I have several emotion-words in mind for a later project, to express emotions
I don't have English words for..)

>It
>should certainly be possible to write about God without using the word
>"God". I could probably come up with a phrase that would be suitable for
>this particular sentence. But really what I need is a phrase that would be
>appropriate everywhere that "God" is used in the Bible. That constraint
>makes this a bit tougher as a translation exercise.
If it were me in that case, I would use the Bible's name of God (YHWH, usually
given 'Yahweh') instead of the title "God" or "Lord" as it is usually
translated.

(The Kadhuhanne word for the title "God" is the same as the word for
Jupiter...)

        *Muke!

--
http://i.am/muke  ICQ: 1936556  AIM: MukeTurtle
"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can
satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another
world."                                 -- C. S. Lewis