andative

[Nancy E Hall]

	After reading the discussion on the word 'andative', I can't
resist adding my two cents. As a phonologist who's not a specialist in a
language family but does typological work that requires consulting
literature on many families, it drives me nuts to open a grammar and
immediately be buried in terms like 'andative'. Subfield-specific
traditions of terminology become so detailed and obscure that they're a
real barrier to comprehension by outsiders, and then so ingrained that no
one bothers to explain them. And when they're based on classical
languages, it becomes hard to even guess what some of the words mean.
	I appreciate it when authors coin an apt Anglo-Saxon term-
something self-explanatory and easy to remember- instead of a new Latinate
one. I suggest a filter on new technical terms: take a poll of 10
non-Siouanist linguist friends and if most can't guess a definition that's
somewhere in the ballpark of what the word means, throw it out.
	The only thing to be said for classically-derived terminology is
that it does tend to be uniform across languages. When I have to read an
article in Russian I'm grateful they don't have their own word for
'svarabhakti'...

Nancy