Lexical ultra-conservatism

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Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism

Post by Zaarin »

TaylorS wrote:This thread makes me sad that there aren't very many polysynthetic languages that are official languages of developing countries, because these neologisms are really fun!
I guess that's what conlanging is for. I'm working on a conworld where most of the major languages are polysynthetic (albeit the setting is also Bronze Age).
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Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism

Post by Soap »

Astraios wrote:
Clearsand wrote:I remember reading somewhere about some inuit language that was so against borrowing that they names parts of a car after the parts of animals. For example: eyes/headlights, heart/engine, ears/mirrors, and so on.
Lakota does that for headlights at least: iyéčhiŋkiŋyaŋkišta ("car eyes").
And English does it too, just not as much. I think "boot" (Commonwealth term for US "trunk") is cognate to "butt", and if not, it's still related to the human body because humans wear boots on their feet. Trunk itself may have once been a human atanomy term before being extended to trees and certain other animate objects. (Cars are animate in most languages with a distinction, right?)

Eyes for headlights is a pretty clear connection to make; I've seen lots of cars with headlights stylized to resemble eyes, usually "mean" looking ones. In fact I just now remembered about Disney's Cars movies (and Planes), which take this to its logical extreme by anthropomorphizing more than just the headlights.

Grill = teeth is an example of the reverse process in English; dehumanizing a human by using the anatomy terms of a car. Ive heard bumper for buttocks, and now that I think of it, trunk foir buttocks as well, even though we have another trunk in our bodies already.

Ears for the side mirrors is something I dont think would catch on in English because we seem to be based more around function than visual appearance. I've talked about the "ears" of a pillow, particularly the kind of pillow that has a decorated border that sticks out from the rest and can flap in the gentle breeze of a floor fan by the bed. To me, cars having ears makes perfect sense, but since cars also have a mirror inside I would probably stick to "ear mirror" for side mirror and leave the speakers to use just "ears" colloquially when context allows. (If cars are animate, using terminology like this could at least sometimes lead to confusion.)

Heart = engine is another really obvious one, that I dont think would ever occur in English or any other European language because, as above, we seem to favor functional description over visual impression. Closest analogy I can think of is another reverse personification, the metaphor "(not) running on all 8 cylinders".
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Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism

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TaylorS wrote:This thread makes me sad that there aren't very many polysynthetic languages that are official languages of developing countries, because these neologisms are really fun!
There is at least one such country: Greenland. (It is "associated with" Denmark, but self-governing, and has a polysynthetic official language which probably fits your criteria.)
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Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism

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WeepingElf wrote:
TaylorS wrote:This thread makes me sad that there aren't very many polysynthetic languages that are official languages of developing countries, because these neologisms are really fun!
There is at least one such country: Greenland. (It is "associated with" Denmark, but self-governing, and has a polysynthetic official language which probably fits your criteria.)
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Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism

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zompist wrote:But after that it's all wordy transcriptions— e.g. Xībānyá 'Spain', Mòxīgē 'Mexico'.
Not really. 西 Xī and 墨 Mò are used as abbreviations and adjectives. E.g. 美墨戰爭 "Mexican-American War", 美西戰爭 "Spanish-American War".

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Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism

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zompist wrote:
Publipis wrote:I think, to a limited extent, there is also some calquing of proper names in Japanese. They seem to like monosyllabic words based on Chinese names, such that in their word for English, the "England" part is just 英, pronounced /ei/, which means "flower petal". And for the USA, there exists the word 米国, where 米 means "rice", therefore their word for the USA means "The Rice Country". These are based on pronunciation, however, so are not actually calques. (Who among us is aware of the original meaning 2000 years ago of the word "America" anyway?)
The phonetic match is closer in Mandarin: 英 is yīng (and means 'outstanding, heroic').
I'm replying to something really old here, but AFAIK, 英 means "excellent" (or "hero") in Japanese too.
Soap wrote:Ive heard bumper for buttocks, and now that I think of it, trunk foir buttocks as well, even though we have another trunk in our bodies already.
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Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism

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soap wrote:Ive heard bumper for buttocks
I'll never hear "The British Grenadiers" the same way again!
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Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism

Post by Arzena »

Modern Standard Arabic has its fair share of lexical conservatives, which gives interesting neologisms from Arabic's triconsonantal derivation patterns. Some from the top of my head:

dabbāba 'tank' from dabba 'to crawl'
mustarjil 'FTM transgender person' from istarjala 'to seek to be a man'
hātif 'telephone' from hatafa 'to call to someone'
ṭāʔira and ṭayyāra (same pattern as dabbāba!) 'airplane' from ṭāra 'to fly'
sayyāra 'automobile' from sāra 'to move'
ḥāfila 'bus' from ḥafala 'to assemble'

In the colloquial forms of Arabic, however, loan words from European languages (French, English) are very common: you ask for aiskrīm
at a Cairene café and glas in Casablanca, not muṯallajāt al-ḥalīb (lit. frozen things of milk); mustarjil is replaced (in Gulf Arabic) by boy, especially in its plural boyāt; hātif goes way to mōbail; and sayyāra (in Morocco) to ṭomobil.

Modern Standard Arabic itself has taken its fair share of loanwords, despite the hand-wringing of linguistic conservatives. A favorite of mine is bunduqiyya 'rifle' from Bunduqiyya 'Venice'. Persian was an old source of loanwords after the Islamic conquest of the Iranian plateau: (firdaws 'paradise', šaṭaranj 'chess', barnamij 'program' and others)
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Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism

Post by Yng »

Arzena wrote:Modern Standard Arabic has its fair share of lexical conservatives, which gives interesting neologisms from Arabic's triconsonantal derivation patterns. Some from the top of my head:

dabbāba 'tank' from dabba 'to crawl'
mustarjil 'FTM transgender person' from istarjala 'to seek to be a man'
hātif 'telephone' from hatafa 'to call to someone'
ṭāʔira and ṭayyāra (same pattern as dabbāba!) 'airplane' from ṭāra 'to fly'
sayyāra 'automobile' from sāra 'to move'
ḥāfila 'bus' from ḥafala 'to assemble'
hātif is an old word for '(unseen) caller', which I've always enjoyed. But I have to admit I've never seen mustarjil in this meaning - mustarjil to me is just an adjective meaning 'acting like a man, mannishly' (usually to describe women) from the verb istarjal which is not 'seek to be a man' (the whole 'seek to' translation for istaf3al forms is pretty dubious most of the time) but rather 'act like a man/in a masculine fashion'. Maybe this exists in the recent LGBT coinages of Morocco only, I don't know.

Here are a couple of other nice ones:

ḥāsūb 'computer' < ḥasaba 'count'
ġawwāṣa 'submarine' < ġāṣa 'sink, dive down'
inqilāb 'coup d'état' (which curiously enough began as an obvious calque on 'revolution' - cf Persian + Turkish - and was originally used positively before acquiring a distinctly negative connotation and being replaced entirely in the positive sense by the much older ṯawra 'rebellion, uprising')
In the colloquial forms of Arabic, however, loan words from European languages (French, English) are very common: you ask for aiskrīm
at a Cairene café and glas in Casablanca, not muṯallajāt al-ḥalīb (lit. frozen things of milk); mustarjil is replaced (in Gulf Arabic) by boy, especially in its plural boyāt; hātif goes way to mōbail; and sayyāra (in Morocco) to ṭomobil.
Muṯallajāt al-ḥalīb?! This sounds like 'milk ice cubes'. 'Ice cream' is actually one I've never seen a non-loan equivalent for - in the Levant, Iraq and Egypt the standard 'Arabic' term is būẓa (actually from Turkish) or maybe ḍanḍarma/dandarma (likewise from Turkish) whilst in Egypt as you say they colloquially use aysikrim. In the Mashriq in general there are huge numbers of loanwords from Turkish, plus a more recent significant number from French, plus some from English (more numerous in areas of UK rule of course). The latter includes some sort of surprisingly everyday ones, like šayyak 'check' and fallal 'fill'.
Modern Standard Arabic itself has taken its fair share of loanwords, despite the hand-wringing of linguistic conservatives. A favorite of mine is bunduqiyya 'rifle' from Bunduqiyya 'Venice'.
What exactly do you mean by loanwords here? I don't think bunduqiyya counts as a loanword - it's bunduq (which might be a loanword from Persian I guess) plus a suffix, but your grouping it separately as a loanword of its own because it comes from the name for Venice (possibly - it might also be from bunduq meaning 'bullet' by analogy with the nut) has confused me.
Persian was an old source of loanwords after the Islamic conquest of the Iranian plateau: (firdaws 'paradise', šaṭaranj 'chess', barnamij 'program' and others)
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Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism

Post by Arzena »

@Yng

Didn't realize that bunduq was a separate loanword from Persian! That's a nice derivation for 'rifle'.

I've only seen mustarjil in the context of trans sex workers in the Gulf countries, but here's a video from Egypt using the word in the sense of 'mannish woman': Nisā2 Mustarjilāt

I used muthallajāt al-ḥalīb as an intentionally stuffy Fusha way of translating 'ice cream'. Source is the Al-Maany dictionary.
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Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism

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R.Rusanov wrote:
...Lakota šúŋka...
Any Lakotans coming up to Bulgaria would be quite shocked, maybe, to hear we regularly eat shunka (meaning sausage)
Isn't шунка "ham"?

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Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism

Post by Io »

It's indeed ham and I remember once in Romania I was buying street food and asked other people on the line to help me choose, when I asked what sunca is I heard them replying back «umm, șunca is...» I quickly said I know what șunca is, I always knew Romanians are terrible with diacritics but I didn't expect they'd omit them in handwriting too.

Having a word for airplane doesn't strike me as language conservatism, many languages have their own word for it. Croatian has a word for helicopter which nobody really uses — zrakomlat; it sounds hilarious to some Slavic speakers. Also, Slavic languages that retain their own words for the months kind of annoy me because I've no idea what these words means though I respect that.

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Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism

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Arzena wrote:Didn't realize that bunduq was a separate loanword from Persian! That's a nice derivation for 'rifle'.
It's bunduki in Swahili, which, for some reason my brain decided to remember by associating it with "bazooka"... which worked, surprisingly.

Swahili uses ndege "bird" for "aeroplane". They're distinguished by animacy. Ndege anakuja/inakuja. "The bird/plane is coming."

@Io, why does zrakomlat sound funny? What's it derived from? I live with a Croatian and a Serbian-German so I'm going to remember this word and say it the next time I hear a helicopter. German Hubschrauber "hub-screwer" is pretty funny.
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Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism

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Imralu wrote:@Io, why does zrakomlat sound funny? What's it derived from?
It literally means 'air-beater'. Zrak 'air' + mlat 'hammer, mallet, thresher'

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Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism

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Even if it is not a polysynthetic language, French Accadémie, always makes a french neologism for every borrowed word...

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Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism

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Vijay wrote:
Imralu wrote:@Io, why does zrakomlat sound funny? What's it derived from?
It literally means 'air-beater'. Zrak 'air' + mlat 'hammer, mallet, thresher'
Oh, that's really good!
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Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism

Post by Io »

zrak doesn't mean anything to us but mlat has different connotations, the verb mlatim means to beat violently/to thrash like when someone's in a fit of rage, it's kind of a slang/low register word, hard to explain really.

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Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism

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Io wrote:Also, Slavic languages that retain their own words for the months kind of annoy me because I've no idea what these words means though I respect that.
They talk about this in some detail here. :)

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Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism

Post by xxx »

In my experiments in a priori (called philosophical) language, each utterance is composed of primes ...
A kind of maximalist polysynthesis (in fact olygosynthesis)...
Impossible to import baptist words as they are without going through these caudine forks...

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Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism

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xxx wrote:Impossible to import baptist words as they are without going through these caudine forks...
What does this sentence mean? What are "Baptist words" and what do they have to do with the Battle of the Caudine Forks?
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Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism

Post by xxx »

baptist words are words that baptize things as christian name by baptism...
To pass under the caudine forks or to pass beneath a Caudine yoke means suffer a great degradation...
that is to say : No borrowed words are allowed without a decomposition in primes...

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Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism

Post by Travis B. »

To say you're being cryptic is a great understatement. But then, you're always cryptic.
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Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism

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I don"t have the lexicon I need as a priori (called philosophical) conlanger for baptist words..
the caudine forks are more common (hum...) in my L1...

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Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism

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xxx wrote:baptist words are words that baptize things as christian name by baptism...
To pass under the caudine forks or to pass beneath a Caudine yoke means suffer a great degradation...
that is to say : No borrowed words are allowed without a decomposition in primes...
Eco discusses various attempts to do this in his work The search for the perfect language (La ricerca della lingua perfetta nella cultura europea). It's interesting to look at his examples because they highlight one of the chief stumbling blocks: the arbitrary nature of the "primes". I wouldn't expect xxx's to look much like Raymond Lull's, for instance.

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Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism

Post by xxx »

linguoboy wrote: they highlight one of the chief stumbling blocks: the arbitrary nature of the "primes".
It is always interesting to see that one reproaches the others always what one is ...
Thus the auxlang is reproached for not being so easy (whereas it is objectively much more so than the natural languages)...
And here one reproaches the arbitrariness of the primes when their number is infinitely fewer than arbitrary roots in any other language...

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