Words that should exist but don't

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Adrianslont
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Re: Words that should exist but don't

Postby Adrianslont » Sat Oct 28, 2017 8:14 am

Vedun wrote:
Adrianslont wrote:
Rhian wrote:
Vedun wrote:Basic words for different smells, like there are blue, green and red for colours and sweet, savory and spicy for tastes. Infact this is an overwhelmingly common lexical gap and such words occur only in one or a couple of languages in Papua New Guinea.

Verbs for motion derived from the respective preposition, e.g. go through, go over, go out, go in between. Georgian has such verbs.


There should be a word for people who are unusually sensitive to bad smells. I spent the last few hours in a group where one person had slightly bad breath. Whereas most people would carry on and not care much, to me it was nauseating. I'm not a fusspot, I just seem a little more sensitive to smells.

Rhian, there is a word for people who are sensitive to odours: osmophobic.

Verdun, English has a number of words for motion plus preposition combos, too eg go into = enter or penetrate, go out = exit, go up = climb or scale or ascend and more.

Cheers.

They are not derived from the respective prepositions though, such verbs would be *throughen, *overen, *betweenen.

Ah, I see - my poor reading of your previous post. But I guess English doesn’t need to derive the verbs from the prepositions - it already has verbs which describe going into, up, down etc. So there is no lexical gap as such - just a different way of filling the gap?
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Re: Words that should exist but don't

Postby Vedun » Sat Oct 28, 2017 4:01 pm

Yes, for most common prepositions anyway - all languages have such verbs (or means to express such concepts if verbs are a closed class). But a productive preposition to verb derivation or even productive preposition to some other part of speech derivation is a cool feature that's rarely seen.
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Re: Words that should exist but don't

Postby Zegpoddle » Sat Nov 04, 2017 7:15 pm

Radiovisiotraumaticodissonance (noun): The sense of shock and disbelief you feel upon finally seeing a photo of a journalist or program host whom you have known only by voice for many years and for whom you had concocted in your mind a completely inaccurate visual image. Example sentence: "Oh my God, I just saw what Sylvia Poggioli / Anthony Kuhn / Robert Siegel / Ophibia Quist-Arcton / [insert name of any National Public Radio reporter here] really looks like, and I am suffering from intense radiovisiotraumaticodissonance! No, no, no! S/he can't POSSIBLY look like that! That's not the right face or hairstyle at all for that voice! It's not I who have been mistaken all these years; it's his/her actual appearance that's all wrong!" :o
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Re: Words that should exist but don't

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sat Nov 04, 2017 9:27 pm

I once heard a Swedish radio reporter tell such a story - he met someone in the street who was shocked to find out that he was the guy on radio: "Please don't destroy my illusion of what you look like!". :shock:
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Re: Words that should exist but don't

Postby IronMike » Mon Nov 06, 2017 8:00 am

For my fellow logophiles, this book is what you're looking for. I got it used pretty cheap, around three USD. There's also a kindle version, at least on the U.S. amazon.
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Re: Words that should exist but don't

Postby Bluepaint » Mon Nov 06, 2017 11:45 am

IronMike wrote:For my fellow logophiles, this book is what you're looking for. I got it used pretty cheap, around three USD. There's also a kindle version, at least on the U.S. amazon.


29 words for kinds of eyebrows? Albanian's going on the target list.
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Re: Words that should exist but don't

Postby Language Heritage » Fri Nov 10, 2017 1:18 am

I live in Cusco, Perú and am from the USA. My girlfriend is from Cusco and speaks really good English. We invent words all the time as a running joke. Most are Spanglish, but some are Spanish conjugations of English worlds. Example - lunchear - to take lunch. Everything is "ito/ita" here so we add these suffixes to English words as well. Like, "I am going to take a nap-cito."

Languages are a lot of fun! :lol: :lol: :lol:
Last edited by Language Heritage on Fri Nov 10, 2017 8:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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