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

From: Ivan A Derzhanski <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Aug 2000 22:10:35 +0300

"Alfred W. Tueting (Tüting)" wrote:
> --- In [email-masked], Ivan A Derzhanski <iad@M...> wrote:
> > There is also a synæsthetic 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