Other Sessions Waiting to Be Organized

[Koontz John E]

Sara's suggestion that an AAA SSILA (CAIL) session on proverbs and the
lack, perhaps, in some cases of proverbs, should be organized, and her
noble offer to organize it, remind me that Robert Rankin and/or myself
have at times thought it might be interesting to have a session or even a
conference on several other issues, which it might be interesting
to post here.

One would be (a) cultigen vocabulary and perhaps some other sorts of
artifactual or technological vocabulary of interest to archaeologists,
probably combined with some sort of attempt at a survey.  This came about
under the inspiration of an article by archaeologist Patrick Munson, if I
recall his name correctly, who attempted to do the survey for Eastern
cultigen terms with interesting results that could have been improved upon
if it weren't so difficult for a non-specialist to tease the relevant
terms out of the literature and make any sense of them linguistically.

Also, (b) it would probably be interesting to look at placenames and
ethnonyms, and (c) loans and loan translations, which come up immediately
as you try to look at the former.

Conferences like these are useful consciousness raising exercises, I
think, not unlike the paper at the recent Chicago Siouan & Caddoan
Conference - I'm sorry I'm forgetting the name of the author - from
Kansas? - on the vocabulary of emotion.  .