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Re: not the most cheerful of subjects...

From:Bob Greenwade <bob.greenwade@...>
Date:Tuesday, January 8, 2002, 0:07
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.) --- Bob's Original Hero Stuff Page! [Circle of HEROS member] http://www.angelfire.com/super2/bobgreenwade/original.htm Music from Bob's Computer! (CD now available!) http://mp3.com/BobsComputer Want more hits to your web page? http://nomorehits.com/cgi-bin/start.cgi?referrer=bobgreenwade http://ads.clickthru.net/bannerlink?host=264157&ban=4