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On 8/9/05, Rex May <rmay@hidden.email> wrote: > I know that JCB decided that one o'clock was a name, for some reason, and I've often > wondered if that makes any sense at all. One thing I'm pretty sure of is that one o'clock, > Monday, and January are _not_ names in any useful sense. gjax-zym-byn uses two different ordinal suffixes on numbers, one for relative ordinals (Nth period from here/now) and one for absolute (Nth within the calendar/clock). So "next month" is meqn'txu ciq-pa and January is meqn'txu ciq-gla > Another problem is that Canis Familiarus seems to be a name, but kanin doesn't. Or am I > just trying too hard to systematize something unsystematizable? There might be good reason for treating the words for animals and plants (and culture-specific foodstuffs, items of clothing, dances, musical styles......) as proper names. I think Vorlin had a few basic words for animals and all others were indicated by the Latin name surrounded (or maybe only preceded) by some foreign-name marking particles. In gjax-zym-byn I've mostly been coming up with root words for genera, sometimes families, rather than species (except for a few salient types, mostly domestic animals like cat, dog, horse...). Species can be indicated with some modifier morpheme compounded with or adjective applied to the genus name. -- Jim Henry http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang.htm