Re: The deliberate redundancy; was: Idioms

At 09:28 08/06/99 -0700, you wrote:

[lots of interesting stuff]

>Once I raised the possibility of having a separate word for "your
>father"
>and "my father."  I haven't embarked on this daunting task of
>relexifying
>Teonaht along these lines, but I've toyed with it.  It could be the
>same principle.  "My father" would be something like "my dear father,"
>and your father would be "your strong father."  I imagine a whole bunch
>of Nenddeylyt words (Teonaht's mysterious source language) providing
>these peculiarities.
        It reminds me of Japanese where words for family relatives are different
depending on whose family you're talking of. For example, "my father" is
"chichi", whereas "your/his/her father" is "otousan". In the same way, "my
mother" is "haha", whereas "your/his/her mother" is "okaasan". It's true
for every family-relative word. The strangest thing is the fact that when
talking _to_ a family relative, you must call him/her by the same word
you'd use for a family relative of someone else! So "dad" is "otousan" and
"mom" is "okaasan". My Japanese explained such a strange behaviour refering
to the idea of respect. When talking of somebody's relative, you must
respect this person, and thus indirectly respect the person you're talking
to, so you use respectful words. In the same way, when talking to your
father or mother, you must respect him/her, thus you must use respectful
words when calling him/her.

>
[snip]

>
>Sally
>http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teonaht.html
>
>
                                                        Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepage/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html