Re: Taxonomic list (and Re: poll 30? (long...Sal at her most voluble)

----- Original Message -----
From: "And Rosta" <a.rosta@...>

> Sally:
> I should have a purely Teonaht word for "rose."
>
> Which reminds me, I preferred the native Teo words to the IE borrowings.
> Partly because I prefer apriori conlangs, and partly because in an
> aposteriori artlang I want to be able to scrutinize it close up & for
> it to still seem real.
Yeah, a lot of the "Indo-European," or basically Latin borrowings were
products of my graduate student years when I was studying historical
linguistics.  I'm not overly fond of them either.  I just now read in _The
DaVinci Code_ that "rose"... oh, how did the dashing American Harvard Prof
put it?... that the word for "rose" had little variation as it was used
across the Mediterranean and Western worlds.  Now immediately, of course, my
warning signals went up.  Come on, now... of course it's going to be the
same in the romance languages.  But could there be any truth behind this?
What's "rose" in Hebrew?  Greek?  Damn that I don't have a Greek dictionary!

Sub rosa... I had never actually questioned this expression.  In the book,
Brown describes how the term allegedly comes from an association of the rose
with secrecy, and that a rose was hung over a door to let outsiders know
that a discussion was private, i.e., "sub rosa."  I'm suspicious of this
author, though, and wonder what the sources are of his knowledge.  Besides
Holy Blood Holy Grail.

Then there is Eco's somewhat mystical "The Name of the Rose."

> The point of using the thesaurus as a conlang resource is not fot the
> listing of synonyms but for the taxonomic grouping of vocabulary. (Not
> all thesauruses do that: some really are synonym lists, so you look
> up "angry" & in that entry it lists synonyms. These are no use.)
That's the kind of thesaurus I was used to.

> > My example for this thesaurus was taken straight out of Hildegard of
> > Bingen's taxonomy.  I intended to describe the Teonaht world in the form
of
> > its inhabitants, its households, its cities, its gardens and farms, its
> > foods, its justice system, etc.  Hildegard is doing the same with her
abbey
> > She starts with God and moves down through the members of the family to
the
> > parts of the body, to illnesses, to the offices of the Church, to the
> > structures of the church, to the vegetables in the garden, the fruit
trees,
> > and so forth.  I've changed her order around, and vastly increased the
list
> > Basically it was this:   start with the name of the group, and move from
top
> > down: great to small or most to least important item.   For the body, I
> > started with the head.  (I realize that I forgot to list the words for
> > eye-color!)  For the foods, I started with the meats and ended with the
> > spices (some would question my sense of importance here!!)   For the
animals
> > I started with the large mammals.  For religion, I started with the one
with
> > which I was most familiar (no top down sense there, please).  For
concepts
> > and sensations, this was just a hodge podge.  I should perhaps
alphabetize
> > those sections.  For the most part, I just went plumb nuts
>
> Ah, I understand better now. This explains the cultural bias of the list.
Alas, yes.  It is decidedly European, and upper class.  I had intended at
some future date to have a list of Teonaht words and expressions after every
group that shows some of the stranger aspects of Old Teon, but I haven't
gotten a "round tuit" yet.  (Round tuits are notoriously hard to find).  At
any rate, the distinction between round, square, and assymetrical houses are
examples of different kinds of Teonaht architectural principles.

> > > I'm always on the look-out for some sort of magic list of English
words
> > > as ingredients to build a basic vocab. I must get round to seeing
> > > whether I have a copy of Rick Harrison's ULD on my hard disk
> >
> > Tell me about that one.  Some of my lists are too detailed, and the
basics
> > get lost in the complexities.  I have started a 501 Teonaht Verbs list,
> > though. :)  :)
>
> Way way back in the early days of Conlang, the illustrious Rick Harrison
> compiled the Universal Language Dictionary, which, iirc, was a list of the
> 2000 most basic 'concepts' in a language.
I've seen the website; it asks me to unzip a file.  YAAAACK!  Okay, I'll do
it and see what happens.  This would be ever so important.

I don't know where you wrote it (did I just snip it?) but I agree with you
that it is quite easy to think of fundamental nouns, but much harder to
think of the fundamental verbs.  Notice how I gradually stopped supplying
the verbs and adjectives in the taxonomy... I just got exhausted.

Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
Eskkoat ol ai sendran, rohsan nuehra celyil takrem bomai nakuo.
"My shadow follows me, putting strange, new roses into the world."
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teotax.html

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