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

On Thu, 29 May 2003 02:12:32 -0400, Sally Caves <scaves@...>
wrote:

>For what it's worth, you can see it at:
>
>    http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teotax.html
>
>It's 88 printed pages, with about 3000 entries in English.  of those, about
>1600 are entered in Teonaht.  Of those 1600 about 600 are already in the
>Teonaht-English lexicon, which itself is about 1600 entries.  And the
>entries in the taxonomy have some overlap.  So I don't really have any idea
>what number of words I've created for Teonaht, and only a vague idea of what
>I've put on-line... much less than the 4000 + I thought I had.  I counted
>the words in the yellowed pages and they came to about 2000, but they
>overlap, <G> again, with what I've got up, and many are horribly out of
>date.  And so many are missing.
I know how that goes; I was under the impression that I had around 3,000
words of Olaetian, but when I actually went to count them, there were
closer to 2500. And even though I have the dictionary on the computer, most
of what I have on Olaetian grammar and historical development of the
language is still only on paper, scattered around in various folders and
notebooks, in an old transliteration that's closer to the actual Olaetian
spelling but doesn't match what's on the web pages.

>At any rate, I've bitten off more than I can chew; I got tired of trying to
>enter these, ran out of time, so this will go up slowly, as the on-line
>Teo-Eng has slowly increased over five years.  The list shows a frolicsome
>outburst for parts of the body, clothing, family, and the household, and
>then a nauseated decline for foods, disease, sensations, a gung-ho pickup
>for religion and concepts...almost nothing on sports and war.
Interesting that they have separate male and female entries for hawks,
ravens, mice, and other animals that don't fit the typical pattern
(domestic animals, or animals frequently hunted). I'd like to "borrow" the
idea of a word for "that which is both right and wrong"; it sounds like
such a fitting concept for a Zireen language. Actually, Zirinka has a very
similar word, "vinê:", glossed as "mixed good/evil", but it really means
something more like "both good and evil at the same time", as "good" and
"evil" are not viewed as being diametrically opposed ideas, but they can
exist in combination. I'm sure that some Zireen language must have a word
for "both right and wrong".

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