Sevly wrote:Uutue mue uutie tie at tie uutie mue uutue tie at tie deue?
/ˈəʊtʊ mə ˈ͏əʊtsɪ tɪ ats tɪ ˈəʊtsɪ mə ˈəʊtʊ tɪ ats tɪ ˈzɛʊ/
orange:color on orange:fruit from coming from orange:fruit on orange:color from coming from what
Orange: does the fruit come from the color, or the color from the fruit?
I suppose this question doesn't make much sense in Deevie, since both uutie, the fruit, and uutue, the color, are derived from an underlying bound morpheme uut-? So as far as Deevie is concerned, they both come from some underlying abstract quality of orangeness.
Now, I'm pretty sure the color comes from the fruit, since how many other things in nature are orange, so uut is actually the Old Deevie term for the orange, which then gave uutue "orange color" via the still productive color suffix -ue. Then, for symmetry, uut was replaced by the renominalization uutie "orange thing" and lost its use as a free morpheme.
The colour comes from the fruit. But I'm surprised at how many of you borrow your polysemy directly from English or other European languages. Tongue = language is one of these - I think worldwide you are more likely to find language is related to a word like speaking rather than tongue.
Orange is another one - the fruit and the colour are the same in english and french but frequently different elsewhere - eg Dutch has sinaasappel for the fruit and oranje for the colour. Japanese has orenji for both, a loanword from english, but also has other words like mikan for native citrus varieties.
Another off the top of my head is glass - having the same word for the material and the container strikes as something english and french do. English also has or had the same word for spectacles and mirrors. But eg Japanese has different words for all of them - although the substance is garasu from dutch and the container is gurasu from english so close.
