Trebor wrote:It makes sense that Mandarin would be able to calque fairly easily, since the language has a long literary, political, social, and cultural history, and China's upper classes may have had access to the materials necessary to translate literally from Latin/Greek. Native American languages aren't comparable in those ways, though. I'm definitely interested in seeing those examples from your Osage dictionary.
By the same token, though, Standard Chinese has more of a need to coin words
en masse because they need to translate technical manuals and the like. For an oral language like Osage, one only needs to coin words and expressions for everyday things.
For items like plants, animals, and food, the Osage generally did the same thing as the settlers: They extended native words and qualified them as necessary. For instance,
too designated a large tuber, generally the water chinquapin (
Nelumbo lutea), which was a staple crop. Potatoes came to fill a similar niche in the Osage diet, so they were called
tóoska "white tubers". Sweet potatoes were called
tooscée "long tubers" or
tóoskue "sweet tubers". Another staple tuber, breadroot or prairie turnip (
Psoralea esculenta), gave its name to beets (
tóole žúe "red breadroot"), carrots (
tóoleži "brown breadroot"), and turnips (
tóolehtąą "big breadroot"). It's worth mentioning that the combining forms of these modifiers are often shortened; the full forms of the last three are
žúuce,
žíhi, and
htą́ka.
One of my favourite combining elements is
mą́ze which means "metal". It can be prefixed to a wide variety of terms to specify not just artefacts of metal but anything mechanical or electrical, e.g.
mą́ze įįštóolą "spectacles" (
įįštóolą is literally "put inside" [
óolą] the eyes [
įįštá]"),
mą́ze oohǫ́ "oven" (lit. "metal cook").
Mą́zeie ("metal talks") is a radio and
mą́zeie ówatǫe is a television set.
Ówatǫe or
ówatoį is a morphologically complex form consisting of the verb
tǫ́pe "watch" with the valence-reducing prefix
wa- and the locative prefix
ó-, i.e. "one watches things in it". Nominalised, it can mean "show", "exhibition", "film", etc.
That's another very productive source of neologisms: nominalisations. Their range can be a bit bewildering.
Óolą "put in" (as in
mą́ze įįštóolą) is used to mean "pie" (e.g.
htóolą "meat pie; sandwich",
hkąącóolą "fruit pie; pie").
Oožú "pour, put in" (
óožu with valence-reducer
wa-) covers a slew of receptacles from bottles to pockets, e.g.
níioožú "pitcher",
niixócoožu "ashtray",
óožuhaa "bag" ("put things into skin"). Some, as you would expect, are very idiomatic:
Hcíwažu, literally "they put stuff in the house", is the word for "headright", an annual payment allotted to eligible households.
And since someone else has already mentioned ethnonyms, most of these are also derived rather than borrowed in Osage. The first White people the Osage encountred were called
įįštáxį "light eyes". Coincidentally, they were mainly French-speaking. When they encountred the English, they distinguished them as
mą́ąhį htą́ka "big knives", a name they eventually transferred to the Americans. Later it was restricted to army officers or government agents, eventually becoming (via metonomy) the usual word for "government". The Navajo are the
haxį́ležekáaɣe (lit. "he makes spotted/speckled blankets"), the Sioux are the
hpą́paxǫ ("he cuts heads"), and the Comanche are the
hpá tóohka ("wet noses"). Some names are borrowed, however, such as
šálaki (<
Tsalagi "Cherokee") and--exceptionally--
íšpaðǫ "Spanish-speaker, Mexican".