From iad@MATH.BAS.BG Wed Aug 09 12:28:07 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 30707 invoked from network); 9 Aug 2000 19:28:07 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m4.onelist.org with QMQP; 9 Aug 2000 19:28:07 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO lnd.internet-bg.net) (212.124.64.2) by mta1 with SMTP; 9 Aug 2000 19:28:05 -0000 Received: from math.bas.bg (ppp109.internet-bg.net [212.124.66.109]) by lnd.internet-bg.net (8.9.3/8.9.0) with ESMTP id WAA05542 for ; Wed, 9 Aug 2000 22:38:03 +0300 Message-ID: <3991ACAB.286763F1@math.bas.bg> Date: Wed, 09 Aug 2000 22:10:35 +0300 X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.74 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban@egroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Beyond Whorf: "things," "qualities," and the origin of nouns and adjectives References: <8mpo0m+6evp@eGroups.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit From: Ivan A Derzhanski "Alfred W. Tueting (Tüting)" wrote: > --- In lojban@egroups.com, Ivan A Derzhanski wrote: > > There is also a synęsthetic effect: Italian _bimba_ `female > > child' notwithstanding, [b] makes a word sound old, big and > > heavy to me. Apart from `grandmother', `father' is another kinship term that often contains /b/ where `mother' tends to have /m/. > _baby_ (!) Yes, and Hungarian _baba_ and Arabic /bubbu/ (both also meaning `doll'). All of these were baby talk words before they entered the adult language. Babies don't perceive themselves as young, small or light, do they? They grow quickly, too. > _bakazana baenda_ (the *girls* are *walking*) :))) Cheating, cheating. That _ba-_ simply marks plurality; the `girl' part is _-kazana_. > The topic blue eyes vs. dark (black) eyes is also pretty common > in Romanian songs - not only in folk songs but also in poetical > "romances" (romant,e): [...] "Am iubit doi ochi albastri..." The concept of blue eyes is simply missing from Bulgarian folklore -- a fact probably associated to the traditional confusion of blue and green (an Altaic feature?). > Yet - doesn't it seem so that lojban and Chinese are pretty > similar in semantics?! /lo melbi/ (the *real existing* beautiful > *things* etc. not an abstract beauty) and all the Chinese > expressions for pretty "concrete" beautiful things intertwined > with reality [...] Thing is, {lo melbi} is what the thing *is*, whereas beauty (_mei3li4_ when used as a noun, no?) is something it *has*. --Ivan