Re: [TIED] The next etymological riddle

From: Håkan Lindgren

Or, let's take a simpler example: the word grandfather. In my language, Swedish, there are different words for maternal and paternal grandfather and grandmother. My maternal and paternal grandfathers were very different personalities, and it's more or less impossible for me to grasp the idea of using the same word for both of them. In Finnish, he and she are the same word, there's only one 3rd person singular pronoun. How do native speakers of Finnish experience this word?

 

Swedish makes it morphologically easy to create different words for your grandparents. The system is transparent even to those with no Swedish. Morfar, farfar, mormor farmor. English could have easily developed something like this (momsdad or the such) but we have not.

 

Your right, of course, in that the associations that go with some words in one language are next-to-impossible to capture in another language.

 

As for Tok Pisin, this is the language with the interestingly different terms for siblings, isn't it? I gather that the two words do not refer to siblings of the same sex, but rather, to siblings of the subject's sex. The word you use to describe your male sibling will the the same word your female sibling uses to describe her female siblings.

 

Mark.