Subject: Re: Beyond Whorf: "things," "qualities," and the origin of nouns and adjectives

From: "Alfred W. Tueting (Tüting)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 06 Aug 2000 10:01:37 -0000

--- In [email-masked], Ivan A Derzhanski <iad@M...> wrote:

> {meili} sounds more beautiful to me than {melbi}, (...)

Indeed. also to me.

> > You might most probably be right: the "inner"(?) semantics
> > of "girl" causes one to have the impression of "female-young-
> > beautiful-..."
> 
> No, that's not what I'm referring to at all. I'm not implying
> any correlation between the two concepts, taken literally,
> typically or stereotypically. What I'm trying to say is that
> the mind apparently sees beautiful girls, plain girls and
> ugly girls as more fundamentally similar than beautiful girls,
> beautiful arrangements of plastic coffee cups and beautiful
> proofs of mathematical theorems.

Oh, yeah - maybe this is the special impact of the (more) concrete
vs. the (more) 'abstract' (a beautiful girl is much more a girl 
than beautiful, a big house much more a house than big).
> 
> > (all in all, a pretty pleasant bundle - with "beautiful" being
> > a bundle itself for "fair-blue-eyed-smiling-slender-...").
> 
> As in "Az a szép, / akinek a szeme kék"?

Pretty deep insights! What an impressive "bundle" - do you also hear
the melody? (The 'picture' of the blue-eyed beauty seems 
stronger than that of the dark-eyed - "...akinek a szeme fekete" -
because of syntactically coming first in order?)

> Which certainly is {melxli}. But: _szép_ used as a noun is also
> {melxli}, or in any case {melni'u}. The same is true of Turkish
> _güzel_; but certainly not of {lo melbi}.

Hungarian "a szép" first of all seems to refer to /le melni'u/,
but different to German ("die Schöne"), it's ambiguous, also
having 
the meaning of German: "das Schöne (in unserem Leben/in unserer
Beziehung)": "a szép (az életünkben/a mi 
összeköttetésünkben)" or "az (életünkben való)
szép" etc.. I'm not too sure if /lo melbi/ also has this semantics
(le mi'o selji'efri 
ne'i lo melbi??? - lo mi'o terckinyne'i melbi???)

.aulun.