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Cleverness in vocab #2.2

From:Roger Mills <romilly@...>
Date:Sunday, October 27, 2002, 16:41
Nihil Sum wrote:
>YES, I did have a word for "hide and seek"! With a plausible etymology! To >hide oneself is |surnak|, to find something is |bulmak|. surna-bulma ?
Well,
>a bit of butchery on the former word allows a rhyming name that might have >been coined by children: |sulmabulma|. I imagine this might back-form into >words like |sulmabulmak| "to play hide-and-seek"; and |sulmak|, a variant
of
>|surnak| used only in the game: |Sulmye!| "Hide!"
Ha! Great (or perhaps, Childish) Minds Think Alike.....much the same process produced Kash _furi-finja_ (some time back, too). Furik is 'hide', _minja_ is 'seek, look for everywhere'. f~m is not a regular alternation-- the sequence usually goes f - p - mb, the reverse is possible too-- but at least they're both in the labial series. Actually, *fumbrinja (/fur-minja/)would have been the regular compound form; *furi-pinja (<furik-minja) a possible one (stop-nasal > stop at the nasal position), but from there it's a short step to /f/. How about this game: Let's play tag. You're "it"! Kash: ará mi/yama-lipa. hat e mesa! let's we/run-catch. You ART one (lipa = lipat 'catch, capture'; yama-lipa might be deformed to _yandipá_)