Re: weekly vocab

David Peterson writes:
 > >   1. birch (the tree)
 >
 >     So, I'm trying to do this for Kamakawi.  First, it's supposed to be a
 > Hawaiian-like language.  While it doesn't have an associated culture, I
 > imagine it as being spoken by people who lived on an island like the Hawaiian
 > islands, and, as such, I'd like to stick with the flora and fauna of the
 > island.  One big problem, though, is that I've never BEEN to Hawaii.  Another
 > big problem is that I don't know what the heck a birch tree looks like (I'm
 > very bad with this; I'm trying to learn).  I looked in my big Hawaiian
 > dictionary, and I couldn't find a word for "birch", which would suggest to me
 > that they don't have them, but does anyone know for sure?

I know very little about Hawaiian flora, but I'm pretty sure they
don't have birches (at least not natively).  The birch is a deciduous
hardwood with papery bark (this is a generalisation, as there are
several varieties, but as a rule birches are characterized by bark
that peels off the trunk easily).  They occur natively in Russia,
Northern Europe and North America.  My impression is that they're very
much a temperate/sub-arctic species, and you wouldn't expect to find
them in a tropical or semitropical region.

I've been trying to find a good picture of a birch online, for those
seeking inspiration (my own (unnamed) conlang is at present too
primative to start assigning tree names) but the best I've found are
below:

http://www.birch-tree.com/2-birch-tree.htm
http://web.triton.net/j/jbrouwer/photos/Birch.JPG
scifun.chem.wisc.edu/chemweek/ fallcolr/birch.jpg