May 16, 2007; Day 209. Happy Birthday, David! I hope you’re having a great time in the Pacific NW. So, here, the weather was threatening to become tornadoic or tornadocious or tornogenic or…something like that. WORD doesn’t seem to like any of them, but surely there should be an adjective in English to go with the noun, right? If you can verb any noun and you can certainly cause any verb to become a causality, you should be able to make a greenness out of green and a bigness out of big. So too, it seems to me, one should be able to have an adjective relating to tornado. Not to mention a verb. In fact, it seems to me that VERBness is the essence of tornado, not noun-ness.
About a quarter mile from our work in several directions are the broken twisted reminders of last summer’s tornado.
Monday, at the doctor’s office I was reading about a tribe in the Amazon rain forest who refuse to gain for themselves any of the tremendous advantages of civilization such as farming, manufacturing, Christianity, learning another language…hmmm….come to think of it, they may be the last ones standing by the end of the next century. The article focused on all the linguistic lacks in their language. They have no general color words but might mention that the current (red) object looks a bit like blood or some berried. They have no quantification words like “some” or “all” and no number system above two. They have no creation myth and their thoughts as well as linguistic constructions seem centered firmly in the here and now. The outside person most familiar with these people admits that they are awesome hunters, gatherers and survivors but the article makes no mention of what they *do* have. Perhaps they have concepts and constructs that we lack. If they bothered to do linguistics they might describe the natives of the so-called “Western World” as lacking all notions of is-ness, now-ness, and non-contingency or whatever.
