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<html><head><title>I love you too</title></head>
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<center><h1><!--title-->I love you too
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<p>Posted by <b><!--poster-->Mark Rosenfelder</b>
on <!--date-->16:18 7/11/01
<p>In reply to: <a href="89.html">Phrases in many languages</a> posted by Philip Newton</b> on 14:34 7/9/01
<p>
Say, you're good at this. Your morphology is correct throughout
(I hadn't thought that there was even that much about Obenzayet online);
the only quibbles I have are syntactic or lexical.
<ul>
<li>In Barakhinei you need an ending phatic particle (especially in such an emotive
sentence), probably <b>ma</b> for male speakers, <b>zêl</b> for
females.
<li>Kebreni: The benefactive would be the best choice, but I'm not happy
with the verb choice. The semantics got vaguer from Methaiun 'desire' to
Kebreni 'like, be fond of', but 'love' moves the other way. I think I need to invent a word here.
<li>Wede:i: Using 'heart' is clever, but I'm wondering if that's the right
organ; not all cultures see emotions as living in the heart. I think
I'll go with <b>zurtau</b> 'desire' instead, itself a derivative meaning
'want to have'. So: <b>Zuringtaku</b>.
<li>Axunashin: the proto-Eastern cognate has (as you noted) changed meaning
to 'desire'; a new word <b>mabik</b> was innovated from baby talk. (Some
some linguists think this is where Latin <b>amare</b> came from.)
So it's <b>[siu] ej mabou</b>. Axunashin is basically SOV.
<li>Xurnese uses the same word: <b>[syu] ri mavu</b>.
<li><b>Lü</B> is a good guess for Lufasha... unfortunately nothing
more is known at this time. Someone suggested that the Chia-Sha languages
should be sisters rather than descendents of proto-Eastern; I like this
idea, but it'll take some work to implement.
</ul>
Man, I sure seem to like pro-drop languages.
There's not a single language with a required pronoun subject! (Some,
like Xurnese, require <i>some</i> pronouns, but not 'I'.)
<p>...OK, I worked out the Kebreni word. :) You might be interested in
the word creation process... I started by looking at Buck's <i>Dictionary
of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages</i>, a great
resource for etymological ideas. I saw that some words for 'love' derive
from 'dear', an idea I hadn't used before.
<p>But, Kebreni doesn't have 'dear' either. I went back to the word
<b>paru</b> 'lip', and derived <b>parsu</b> 'kiss' (the infix -s- derives
a verb expressing the usual action associated with a noun; cf. <i>poc</i>
'foot' --> <i>pocsu</i> 'kick'). That gives us the adjectivization
<b>pansyr</b> 'dear, loveable', and from that the verb <b>pansyru</b>
'love'.
<p>After all that, we get <b>pensyniri</b> 'I love you' (or, to give
one of those exceedingly literal translations that got Benjamin Lee Whorf
in trouble, 'loving is going on that benefits you').
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<b>Mark Rosenfelder</b>
<i>16:18 7/11/01</i>
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