From iad@math.bas.bg Tue Feb 8 00:24:28 2000 X-Digest-Num: 357 Message-ID: <44114.357.1950.959273826@eGroups.com> Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2000 10:24:28 +0200 From: Ivan A Derzhanski Subject: Re: And the Eskimos have 100 words for 'Snow Cone' sklyanin@pdmi.ras.ru wrote: > Ivan Derzhanski wrote: > >Never mind `fun'; why is there no word for `meal' in Russian > >(or Bulgarian, or many other languages for that matter)? > > Yes, I had a tough time trying to translate the gismu "sanmi" for my > Lojban-Russian dictionary (my current project, far from completion). > After all, I came up with "trapeza", a word rarely used in modern > language but the nearest thing to "meal" I could think of. Yet not nearly near enough. Some examples in the Codex talk about {citka le sanmi}; a _trapeza_ is something you can organise, share with someone, but you can't eat it. (Maybe etymology has something to do with it: before the two words could refer to an eating event, _meal_ was `food' and _trapeza_ was `table'.) How about glossing {sanmi} as `breakfast, lunch or dinner'? Is `arm or hand' not more palatable than `human upper limb' as a gloss for _ruka_? -- <'al-_haylu wa-al-laylu wa-al-baydA'u ta`rifunI wa-as-sayfu wa-ar-rum.hu wa-al-qir.tAsu wa-al-qalamu> (Abu t-Tayyib Ahmad Ibn Hussayn al-Mutanabbi) Ivan A Derzhanski H: cplx Iztok bl 91, 1113 Sofia, Bulgaria W: Dept for Math Lx, Inst for Maths & CompSci, Bulg Acad of Sciences