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Rex May - Baloo wrote: > > Okay, we've got zoi for no-. Two syllables, then? > Now, I really don't like 'pu' for the 'that' > which means remote from both go and zi, so how about tyaw, from Mandarin > tiao2, which seems to mean remote or distant? It's uncommon enough that I had to look it up in a dictionary. How about Hindustani <dur>, which already fits the phonology? Or, Malay <jauh> as "jaw" or "jau"? (Too bad we can't use the Hokkien <hng> as <hq>, though the Fuzhou cognate would give us <hwoq>, which could work.) > And, having searched and thought, I'm inclined to go with 'heni', from > English 'any', because the nicest idea was 'gin,' but I want that for a > badly needed single-syllable word for 'computer.' Why is "gin" particularly good for "computer"? And why should such a complex machine be a morpheme, anyhow? Why not a compound of some kind? A calque on the (Taiwanese) Mandarin <dian4nao3> could be "dyenbrein", if we borrowed <dyen> for "electrical". (But shouldn't <brein> be <breyn>?) I suspect that whoever ends up creating most of the Ceqli vocabulary will have to become very adept at creating calques on existing compound words from other languages. German and Mandarin are both quite good at this, where English and Japanese tend to simply borrow compounds intact, just adapting them to the native morphophonology. Ceqli phonology is limiting enough that the English-Japanese approach should be mostly limited to morphemes. At least, that seems like the most productive approach to me. -- Mike Wright http://www.CoastalFog.net _____________________________________________________ "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese." -- Charles de Gaulle