I love you too

Posted by Mark Rosenfelder on 16:18 7/11/01

In reply to: Phrases in many languages posted by Philip Newton on 14:34 7/9/01

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.

• In Barakhinei you need an ending phatic particle (especially in such an emotive sentence), probably ma for male speakers, zêl for females.
• 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.
• 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 zurtau 'desire' instead, itself a derivative meaning 'want to have'. So: Zuringtaku.
• Axunashin: the proto-Eastern cognate has (as you noted) changed meaning to 'desire'; a new word mabik was innovated from baby talk. (Some some linguists think this is where Latin amare came from.) So it's [siu] ej mabou. Axunashin is basically SOV.
• Xurnese uses the same word: [syu] ri mavu.
• Lü 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.

...OK, I worked out the Kebreni word. :) You might be interested in the word creation process... I started by looking at Buck's Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages, a great resource for etymological ideas. I saw that some words for 'love' derive from 'dear', an idea I hadn't used before.

But, Kebreni doesn't have 'dear' either. I went back to the word paru 'lip', and derived parsu 'kiss' (the infix -s- derives a verb expressing the usual action associated with a noun; cf. poc 'foot' --> pocsu 'kick'). That gives us the adjectivization pansyr 'dear, loveable', and from that the verb pansyru 'love'.

After all that, we get pensyniri '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').