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Re: new, young



--- In ceqli@yahoogroups.com, "Marcos Cramer" <marcos.cramer@...> wrote:
>
> > Those pages are a bit out of date. I'm doing current work at:
> 
> > http://ceqli.pbwiki.com/
> 
> Thanks for letting me know. That's very useful. It might be a good ideo to
> put a link at http://www.geocities.com/ceqli/Uploadexp.htm to
> http://ceqli.pbwiki.com/, because if people google "ceqli" they'll just find
> http://www.geocities.com/ceqli/Uploadexp.htm.
> 
Just did it.  Thanks.

> > "Old" seems a frequent enough word that I'd rather it be a reversal, so if
> we
> > adopt stira/stari, jun can go.
> 
> Prefering reversals over "po" for frequent words makes sence, because this
> way we can avoid frequent words getting too long. But then "stari" is just
> as long as "pojun" and "jun" is shorter than "stira", so if we want frequent
> words to be as short as possible, "jun" and "pojun" should be prefered over
> "stira" and "stari".
> 
> What would you think about using "pojunxa" or "starixa" instead of "gil"?
> 

You already convinced me that "gil" isn't necessary, so it goes. It'll be derived from the 
word for 'old' plus 'xa.'  And your point brings up a frustrating thing about reversals.  The 
reversals I like best, of course, are monosyllabic, and in selecting roots in the first place I 
try to take shortness and reversability into account.  'bon' was the original word for "good, 
" for example, and I changed it to "haw" in order to have the "hwa" reversal.

And I try to borrow, rather than coin, roots whenever possible.  That's how I came up with 
stari, from Russian.  "jun" doesn't reverse well.  And sometimes I find just the right root, 
but it's already been taken for something else. snoy/syon are the perfect pair.  The reverse 
is phonetically distinct, and it's easily pronounced.

In a case like this, I sometimes go for a related root.  For example, I might borrow E 'boy' 
to mean 'young.'  Then 'old' would be 'byo.'