Re: not the most cheerful of subjects...

At 08:13 AM 1/5/02 -0800, you wrote:
>much to my dismay... last night i found myself wanting to express the
>concept of anger in narethanaal... so i was wondering how people on the
>list went about describing the various degrees from annoyance right on up
>to rage... at this point i'm considering a word for a type of anger that
>can only be directed at mothers... because nothing else would be severe
>enough... or perhaps make the term for 'so angry all you want to do is
>scream at the top of your lungs and break things' tranlate literally to
>mean 'angry with mother' or something... apologies if that's a bit too
>much info about my personal life but i'm also running into snags on the
>last part because i've been trying to avoid making the distinction between
>female and male... so nongender specific parent could be confused to mean
>father...
    In my conlang Rav Zarruvo, many words for intermediate concepts are
built by putting together two root words (one syllable each) into a
compound word.  Anger directed at a parent, by implication coming from the
parent's child, would be made up of xong (to be angry) + vya (child or
offspring).  Since you're looking for rage rather than simple anger, I can
increase the severity of the verb with the suffix -'ung, and the state of
rage can be changed from "be enraged" to "the state of rage" with the
prefix yi-, yielding the final word yixongvya'ung.  (It's just a tad long
and difficult to pronounce as words in this language go, but that's fitting
for a word that, in this culture, would probably be limited to poetry and
the practice of psychology.)
    You were wanting a word that was gender-neutral regarding the target of
the anger, correct?  I'd think that defining the relationship of the
subject to the target, rather than the other way around, as a part of a
compound word is one way to do that -- especially if it's a word for either
common or technical usage.
    (As a kelly-green newbie, I'm not sure how to notate the exact phonemes
for these syllables, so I'll mention now only that the x is a velar
fricative -- voiced vs unvoiced isn't phonemic in this language -- and get
back on the rest at another time for anyone who's curious.  Also there are
normally tone diacritics over the vowels, but those don't translate very
well from WordPerfect; for the curious, they'd indicate a low tone i,
rising and falling o, rising a, and falling u.)

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