[Lexicog] Getting a cold

[Kenneth C. Hill]

Another example of a language whose normal manner of referring to an ailment initially strikes an English-speaker as weird is Hopi. To report that there is something wrong with a body part, one says "I have a (body part)." For example, hokya is 'leg'; hokya'yta is 'have a leg/legs'. This can be used literally as in kawayo naalö-q hokya'yta [horse four-accusative have.leg] 'a horse has four legs'.  But if one says piw nu' hokya'yta [again I have.leg], this is not understood to mean 'I have a leg again (and I didn't have one before)' but rather 'I have a bad leg again' or 'There is something wrong with my leg again'.

The story is different for diseases. The verb na'pala means to contract a disease and it has many derived froms to specify the progress of a disease. Na'pala and the corresponding derived noun na'pali are often compounded with a noun stem to specify the nature of the disease.

A cold is not described the same as a contractable disease. A congested nose is kwaayaqa. 'I have a cold' is: nu' kwaayaqmokiwta, i.e., 'I am suffering from a cold'. 

kwaayaq-mok-iw-ta [congested.nose-die/suffer(sg.subj)-stative-durative]

Many Uto-Aztecan languages show the same verbs used for both 'die' and 'suffer'. To the beginning student of such languages it seems that when one says 'I'm thirsty' (= 'I'm suffering from thirst') it means 'I'm dying of thirst'.

--Ken Hill

rtroike at email.arizona.edu wrote:                                  
 Wayne,
 
 Could you give us a morphological breakdown of the Cheyenne expression?
 Is it really an idiom? Or just the customary way to refer to illnesses?
 English is odd in treating them as something received or possessed. Whorf
 could have fun with that.
 
 English: I have an ear-ache.
     Spanish: Me duele el oido.  (My [inner] ear hurts me.]
 
 Thanks to Andrew Shimunek for the Mongolian example. Sometimes other languages
 just seem strange because we take the expression in our own language for
 granted. I've often found that I gained insight into English by holding it
 up to the mirror of another language.
 
 Rudy Troike
 
 
     
                       

 
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