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Re: [westasianconlangs] Sadi

Adam wrote:

<<All homonyms would be/are spelled the same.  And as I
said I have several already.  But most of them are
related meanings derived from the same root, or
differnet parts of speech.  I abandoned "avi" as the
greeting because "avi" was also an important form of
the verb "to have".  It seemed too confusing to
survive.  "Sheet of cloth" and "dirt farm" might be
different enought to co-exist.  As you pointed out
"financial institutuion" and "river side" manage.  But
if I asked "do you have a bank" no one would assume I
meant "river side" while if I asked "ava juni sadi" it
really could mean "do you have a bolt of cloth" or "do
you have a cruddy little farm".>>

I still don't understand the problem.  And why did you get rid of "avi" as "hello"?  A regular spelling system is one thing, but it seems like trying to get rid of these ambiguities is specifically making the language unrealistic.  First of all, no one would ever confuse the "avi" that means "hello" with the "avi" that means "I have".  Do you really think the following would ever happen:

A: "Avi!" (waves his hand and smiles)
B: (perplexed) "Maa avas?" (i.e., "What do you have?")

That would just never, never happen.

Now further, compare the meanings of your words for "sadi": "sheet of cloth" and "dirt farm".  While it's true that if someone says "Do you have a sadi?" it *could* mean "dirt farm" or "sheet of cloth", I would be hard-pressed to contrive a situation in which there could possibly be *any* confusion. For example, say two people meet in the city and are discussing the various properties.  One asks the other, "So, do you have a sadi?"  Do you really think there's any chance of the other guy saying, "Yes, I have lots of sheets of cloth.  Why do you ask?"  There's just no way.

Also, words don't have to be extremely different to coexist.  Think of "paper".  If I say, "Give me the paper" (or "that paper"), and there's a newspaper, and a whole bunch of loose papers around, which am I talking about?  In fact, I could very well be talking about both: Maybe I want to see the sports page; maybe I want to see the paper I was just writing some verb paradigms on.  Does this mean that I'll never refer to a newspaper as "paper" again?  Hardly.  In fact, "newspaper" is rarer than "paper", in my idiolect.  There are hundreds of zero-derived examples like this in English that coexist happily side by side.  So to think that "dirt farm" and "sheet of cloth" couldn't coexist is, IMO, not an accurate way of thinking about the issue.

Now, let's say that you had two words, and one was "hoe" and the other was "shovel".  If both of these were called "sadi", then there would be confusion, and I'd predict that one would pick up an ending somewhere (like "sadito" for "hoe", or something).  The reason is that these are two commonly used things on a farm, so it's detrimental to farm work to call them the same thing.  However, I can imagine that, in the city, these things might still be referred to as "sadi", because city people just don't have that much contact with farm implements, and so the distinction is an unimportant one for them.

Mind, this issue is completely unrelated to the other issue (i.e., whether the two different /s/'s will actually become [s] in Carrajena).  I would like to suggest that if they *do* both become [s], then there is no problem, and you should keep the words.

-David
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