spanick wrote:hwhatting wrote:Next: heavy
libqh [libχ] "heavy" (lit. Weighty, from root "l-bqh" having to do with weight, weighing)
Nota Bene: in the transcription, the fricative should be the voiceless uvular rather than voiceless velar, but my phone refuses to make the correct symbol so I'll have to edit this later.
Next word: to trepan, to drill through the skull
Poswa:
Well, the easiest answer, and the one that is most likely the proper one, is to simply take
wipap "skull" and
pumpel "drill" and make
wipwappumpel "trepanation, skull-boring" and leave it at that. But looking at the morpheme breakdown of
pumpel, it's
pum "claw" +
pfel "needle, prick". So I'm back to nature words again that have nothing to do with drilling. Why not the more descriptive and exciting
-bwe "poke a hole in"? (This is a regular sound change, found in serial verbs, from the full form
blube.) That would make the word
wipwabbwe.Then, with the iterative (repeated) aspect infix
-at-, it could be used in a sentence like
Wipwabbwatebebi.
I poked a bunch of holes in your skull.
(Poswa marks tense and both persons in its verbal suffixes.)
Pabappa:
Here, most likely, the same trick will work, in that I have a choice of how fancy I want to be with the morphemes. If I translate it the literal way,
wibap means skull and I have a choice between the funny sounding
pornobrel for "drill" (cognate to
pumpel above;
porno means "sharp, straight claw") and
pipasam which is cognate to a word for nail. However, there is a difference:
pornobrel simply means "worm", since worms often "drill" through objects, whereas
pipasam also means woodpecker. So is trepanning more like having a woodpecker whacking away at your head with its beak or more like having a worm crawling around inside you? Probably neither, which is why I'm going to avoid the animal metaphors entirely and go with another verb meaning "to poke a hole in", which in this case is actually derived from one of the words for window,
blupaupa. Pabappa would be less likely than Poswa to make a single compound word out of this, its aspect markers are suffixes rather than infixes, and it does not mark for person on its verbs, so the sample sentence for Pabappa looks quite different:
Poma wibapip blupaupadabi. Tu, mas panampa?
I made a bunch of windows in your skull. Do you like it?
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next:
volcanic fissure, any opening of a volcano other than the dome