Sunday, April 9, 2017

Some minor thoughts on opening, closing, and doors

So I was walking home and thinking about how mesoamerican languages use body part symbolism in word formation and compounding. Or I so I thought; I can't seem to find any references to it now. From there I was thinking how TbKt would express words for things like "door", "open", and "close". I decided that door probably wouldn't be a body part compound, most likely it would be something like "opening/what is opened". From there, I thought how the word "open" would be. I figure that some sort of thing where opening is an extension of revealing. Ends up I already have a word meaning open, so I just stuck reveal on there too. I don't have a word for "close" yet, nor do I have one for "hide" so I'm combing them into one root. Then I decided that door would probably fit better as "somethings that hides/closes things" (kind of by analogy with lid).

Some important distinctions (from English):
  1. If you hide something by covering it up (from above, with another object) you use a different root YHT. I thought for a while that maybe door could be related to this root but I decided against it because it mostly has to do with things that rest over other things (hats, lids, snow, etc).
  2. We might say that someone has an open mind but in this language it would be "unbounded mind" (if the ideas it is open to are "good") or a "soft/wooly mind" (if the ideas aren't). By extension the opposites are a "bound mind" and a "hard/rocky mind" respectively. A "hollow mind" could also work, though it has the implication that that person is so open-minded that they believe anything, so more like gullible. Actually, as I think about this more, I think the underlying metaphor is that the mind is a field/farm, so I'm not sure how well "hollow mind" would work. Maybe a "fallow mind"?
  3. This use of door refers to things that open and shut, that is covers for door-space. This can be gates, curtains, what we actually think of as doors, and so one. A door that cannot be closed (because it is a space in a wall) is the nothinging (nonexistent) part of a wall. A "door" fills the nothinging of a wall (on that note, that whole root works really weird for english speakers, I think. A whole root for not existing).
  4. I'm not sure if analogy/metonymy with doors and metaphorical ideas would work like they do in English. Probably something else would work better, depending on the metaphor. However there probably are times it would work. So I guess it depends on the figurative speech in question.
I was going to do some sentences and examples, but I don't think I will today. Just plain lazy and I ant to chase another post doing stuff on the metaphor of the mind being a farm.  Since that was a coolish sort of idea I had.  Metaphors are fun!

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