O’e
o’e
- (v.) to be swollen
- (adj.) swollen
- (n.) swelling
O’e epi o ei.
“My ankle is swollen.”
Notes: Rather badly. Take a look:
Yeah, human ankles ain’t supposed to look like that.
The story is I was at my birthday party on Sunday, and me, a few of my friends and my little sister decided to play basketball. I was in jeans and semi-dress shoes; one of my friends was in flip-flops; we were using a tiny ball playing on an 8 foot rim (at night [while I was sick])—suffice it to say that these were not ideal conditions. Nevertheless, we decided to play.
Things were going pretty well (my team was up 9-8) when I drove to my left, and apparently planted on the side of my foot (that must have been what happened), and totally messed up my ankle. It swelled up to the size of a tennis ball. Currently it’s the size of a lopsided tennis ball, so that’s improvement. But, yeah, not one of my best ideas.
Regarding Kamakawi, awhile back I talked about modern conlangers having a different experiential basis from the culture their conlang is attached to. The word “swell” is one of those that brought that point home to me.
Most of my languages, for awhile, didn’t have a word for “to swell” (in fact, the concept itself seems kind of strange to me). A word for “to swell” (or “swelling”), though, is often one of the oldest words that exists in any given natlang.
Just like everyone else, I’ve experienced plenty of swelling in my life, but I never would have thought of “swelling” as a basic concept if I hadn’t learned that it was. To be honest, television seems more central to my personal human experience than swelling. That, of course, isn’t so for folks that don’t have television (or electricity).
And the problem is all languages come from somewhere. Unless one has decided on a fantasy setting where a group of beings with 20th/21st century human technology start the seed of all the languages which follow, one has to account for a very old, very ancient state of the language upon which the modern language is built.
So, something to think about: Check your conlangs for a lexeme dealing with “swelling”. One of the dilemmas I always have in coining new words is if (a) the culture should have a word for it, and then (b) if it should, should it be a basic term or derived in some way. It appears that, with greater than chance frequency, natural human (or human-like) societies will all have a word for swelling, and it will be a basic term. That should make coining a word for it pretty simple!
(Oh, note on the iku: That’s an iconic representation of swelling. Why is the limb there not swollen? Because it’s the violent action [i.e. those four short little lines] that’s happening to it that’s going to cause the swelling!)
January 25th, 2011 at 6:23 am)
Great post- good point on concentrating on basic words first & deriving from them. I like the iku =) Hope your ankle is better soon!
January 25th, 2011 at 10:35 am)
OK. I didn’t have a word for swollen/swelling, but I do now. anŋā.
January 25th, 2011 at 7:36 pm)
Belated happy birthday, first of all!
Whee, I pass the swelling test. pjaukra has berw-, and Ājat he-Heloun has two words I’ve glossed that way, t-pinfep and t-ṗhy (both inceptives but from underived bases, and maybe ‘bulge’ is better for the latter). Kibülʌiṅ and Sabasasaj, nothing yet.
January 26th, 2011 at 1:00 am)
I’m chuffed. My eclectic language has a verb for swelling: shúlant. It looks like I borrowed it from German. Still not close to the point in lexicon making where I can think about derivations. I wish I was!
January 26th, 2011 at 1:36 am)
To me, swelling seems like such an unbelievably complex process. I feel like an enormously long word should be used to describe it. I’m simultaneously fascinated and disgusted by it. Perhaps that’s why I want to separate it from myself with as many phonemes as possible…