Deriving modern words from Proto-Eastern roots

Posted by Jay Shorten on 18:11 10/9/01

In reply to: (none)

Have any antiquarian-type Verdurian scholars (the kinds who would wear the cap Shm Revouse wears on a daily basis) thought of making up new archaic-style words by this process?

1. Take the word you wish to borrow from another language, such as Xurnash.

2. Trace what ought to be its derivation from proto-Eastern. If there isn't one, ummm, back-derive one up.

3. Take that *word and trace it down through the Central and Ca\xa9\xa3inorian families, applying the proper sound changes and voilà! [or however you say voilà! in Verdurian] you have the 'truly proper' Verdurian form. Re ally, what is the sense of knowing so Përei Rhonei if we can't apply the knowl edge to restore words to their pure forms as they ought to be instead of strange borrowed forms?

4. Perhaps if you want to be truly antiquarian you would stop at Ca\xa9\xa3inor instead. [I should write Cadhinor, but that always makes want to read it as Cad-hinor or Caddinor.]

An example using English would be if we wanted a truly English word for "computer", instead of borrowing from the Latin "computare", we traced "computare" to its PIE root, or its supposed root, and then traced the root back down through proto-Germanic and Anglo-Saxon. (I heard once that Tolkien did a similar thing by modernising the names of the Anglo-Saxon months.)

Perhaps this would be a Zhesifónian philosophico-linguistical school instead :) Is there such a school? :)

Jay Shorten

Mark responds:

Sorry to munge the Unicode... messages are being manhandled more than usual right now. (Looks like I need a new SSH Telnet for home...) I don't like writing 'Cadhinor' either, but till I can get a Unicode font for the Mac, I'm out of luck.

Your scheme is clever, but I'm afraid that Verdurian scholars regard "so pere rhon" as something of a barbarism... the dregs out of which the perfect languages, Cadhinor and Cuêzi, emerged. So pedants would prefer to ransack the lexicons of these languages in order to baffle and annoy their colleagues...

As for Anglo-Saxon, run, do not walk, to the Circolwyrde Wordhord!
