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on 2/8/03 10:22 PM, Alexander Browne at alexbrowne@hidden.email wrote: >> I've decided that the Ceqli word for 'person' should be 'so' > [...] >> 'xi' means 'woman' > [...] >> I'm considering 'jo' (Engl male name) or 'vo' [...] > > I could see how one might think---no, make that 'feel'---you're > favoring males in that 'person' is a word ending in o matches with male > -o but contrasts female -i. Not that I have a problem with it ... You know, you're right. And it sort of offends my own sense of symmetry. I could go back to the original 'cel' for 'person'.... Let's see: We want three different words ? person, man(male), woman(female) All should have the form CV, with each C and V being different. The latter two will have the forms Co and Ci. Assigning the second two thus: zo and xi means that 'person' must end with vowel 'u' I'm inclined towards 'su'. Now, this 'su' will serve as the word for person and as a general suffix... gunsu ? gunman (actually gunperson. Can also use gunxi and gunzo.) What we're doing here is saving some syllables. "Su" means -er in this context, and has male and female versions in zo and xi. Let's play around: hil to heal pro professional hilpro doctor hilproxi woman doctor xihilpro doctor for women Make sense? Now, we really need, I think, to avoid this ambiguity: xise hilpro does this mean a doctor who is female or a doctor for women? How can we solve this? Can we restrict xi and zo to woman and man, and have yet another pair of words for female and male? Or derive one set from the other? Or, better yet, could we say that xise hilpro has to mean doctor who is female, and require that we have the euivalent of "for-woman doctor" to mean the other thing? Maybe use "ben" (for the benefit of) as the prefix here... to benxise hilpro. the doctor for women. All right, then xise and zose mean female and male, but we can also use benxise and benzose for doctors, bathrooms, bicycles, etc. Is the problem solved? -- >PLEASE NOTE MY NEW E-MAIL ADDRESS: rmay@hidden.email > Rex F. May (Baloo) > Daily cartoon at: http://www.cnsnews.com/cartoon/baloo.asp > Buy my book at: http://www.kiva.net/~jonabook/gdummy.htm > Language site at: http://www.geocities.com/ceqli/Uploadexp.htm >Discuss my auxiliary language at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ceqli/