Talk:Pravic

"Biological parent" vs. "caretaker"
Besides expanding the contractions and wikifying the text, I've reverted the change to the part of the text dealing with descent. If my memory works right, there is (or it is implied so) a specific, probably technical term for "biological parent", and the terms for "mom" and "dad" are used in everyday speech. Biological descent is not important sociologically, but that's precisely why such a distinction should exist. (Imagine a child that has a genetic problem. At least the doctors need to have a term for biological ancestors.) --Pablo D. Flores 8 July 2005 10:56 (UTC)

Possible origins of "mamme" and "tadde"
Is there a possibility that Ursula Le Guin might have borrowed these words from the Breton language? Her husband, Charles Le Guin, is a frenchman of Breton origins (see interview here). The right spelling in Breton language would be "mamm" and "tad" (which respectively mean "mother" and "father"). --HerveGourmelon 15:28, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

Intriguing! Would the word ammar (brother/sister) be borrowed from the same source? --Zrajm 11:54, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

Coming back to my own comment years later, I googled and found this list of Breton kinship terms which does contain the word for brother ("breur") and sister ("ch'oar") but unfortunately not the word for sibling. (In my native tongue, Swedish, we use the word for sibling which much greater frequency than is the case in the English language. Might this also be the case in Breton?) --Zrajm (talk) 20:10, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

The "modes" as something grammaticalized
I am not sure that the "Modes" are part of the language, like mood in natural ("real") languages. I felt these to be more like a mixture of a certain type of rhetorics (argumentation) and a continued reference to a specific conceptual domain. E.g. when reading Einstein, Shevek notices that he carefully avoided the religious or even the ethical mode in his explanation of relativity. Shevek was reading Einstein in Iotic translation, so he could not have seen an absence of a linguistic aspect of Pravic in the text. It can be argued that even if these "modes" are more than language, each could involve specific grammatical, lexical or stylistic conventions (e.g. written English scientific discourse uses some specific, though not exclusive grammar, vocabulary and rhetorics), but even so, one could not assert with any certainty that this is something that could be considered purely (or mainly) linguistic. All in all, there is just too little information to put the "Modes" as a feature of Pravic in the main article.symbolt (talk) 20:58, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

"Completely neutral as to gender?"
The article says:


 * The word ammar is used for "brother" (or "sister" -- the language is completely neutral as to gender)

But at least 'mamme' and 'tadde' are gender-specific... 179.253.249.214 (talk) 22:07, 16 September 2013 (UTC)