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Could you use puella? Maybe with an augmentative suffix? C-a uses huiña < FEMINA, but if it had used this suggestion it would have had *puejuna, which would have been interesting since PUELLA dropped from the language. Adam On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 2:03 PM, Deiniol Jones <deiniolabioan@hidden.email>wrote: > > > Bundài de tutei! > > I've just discovered a rather embarrassing lexical gap in Dravean: I > have no word for "woman". Given that I *do* have words for such non- > basic concepts as "sponge cake" (zenuasa), and "hostile" (samaicus), > this particular oversight is somewhat worrying. However, I'm stuck on > what to fill the gap with: <feama> /"fjama/, the regular reflex of > FEMINA, doesn't really appeal to me. And I've already used <moglar>, > the reflex of MULIER for an adjective meaning "female", and don't > particularly want to duplicate it. > > In Romansh, the reflex of FEMINA has something of a pejorative ring to > it, and so has largely been replaced by reflexes of DOMINA. The > Dravean reflex is <duna>, which is already in use as an honorific > meaning "Mrs." Now, there's nothing necessarily wrong with using the > same word as the common noun meaning "woman": German does something > similar after all, and as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire Dravean > came under a great deal of German influence. Not only that, there's > strong pan-Romance support for this substitution: in Occitan the > regular word for woman is <domna>, for example, as it is in Italian. > > However, I'm wondering if there are any other options? Your thoughts? > > Dan > > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]