[RNLD] Word request

[Nicholas Evans]

Kayardild has a productive system for referring to people who have recently been bereaved, e.g. kambin-kurirr [matrichild-dead] would be used of a woman who had recently lost her child (or a man whose sister had recently lost her child). A lot of other Australian languages have special bereavement terms of this typeBest Nick

On 06/13/13, Rozenn Milin  <rozenn.milin at yahoo.com> wrote:
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> Hello everybody,
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> A friend of mine, in France, lost one of his children a few years ago. 
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> He then noticed that in most languages we know, there are words to name a person who lost their wife or husband (widow in English), and a child who lost his parents (orphan), but there is no word to name a person who lost their child...
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> This appeared unfortunate to him and he proceeded to try to convince the French Academy to create such a word. The Academy is OK with the idea, but they first asked him whether such a word exists in other languages.
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> So I thought I would send an email to the RNLD list, since it reaches a bunch of linguists who have studied a whole lot of languages... If any of you happens to have heard of such a word in any language, would you please get back to me ? And if you haven't, please, send the word out !
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> Thanks !
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> Rozenn
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--
Prof. Nicholas Evans
Head, Linguistics, 
School of Culture, History and Language
ANU College of Asia-Pacific, ANU
ACT 0200 Australia
Tel. 61 0 2 6125 0028
Fax. 61 0 2 6125 1463
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