From lojbab@lojban.org Tue Feb 8 06:31:09 2000 X-Digest-Num: 358 Message-ID: <44114.358.1953.959273826@eGroups.com> Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2000 09:31:09 -0500 From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" Subject: Re: And the Eskimos have 100 words for 'Snow Cone' At 10:24 AM 02/08/2000 +0200, Ivan A Derzhanski wrote: >From: Ivan A Derzhanski > >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'.) My English Russian disctionary gives yeda as a translation for "meal", "repast", and "food". It may not exclusively mean "meal", but certainly sounds like it would belong in a synonym list along with an explicit list of meals. lojbab ---- lojbab lojbab@lojban.org Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org