"Dai stiheh": plural forms of the greeting?

[Birdhead]

Amanda- no, I'm pretty sure it's Go Well, not Well Met- there's never been even a suggestion for met, but there have been many for well.
Ka Kite
Tui

Tuibird in Aotearoa
Conservationist, Scientist, and proud of both!
Chocolate lover extraordinaire...
Ahahahaha, ahahahahaha, ahahahaha...
My mission: Bringing Maori to the world!
STRESSING
She Who Is Supposed To be in Three or Four Places At Once every Lunchtime for the Next Two Weeks.

[Poliester]

i still dont get the dia steheh and dia stiho. its 2 confusing!
in 1 of the books its dia'stiho i think and in another its different! uuuuuuuuugggghhhhhhh

[white tiger]

Rowen Avalon your #1 is my problem too.The book store web site near me said it came out in paperback and I was like YAY! Then I went there and they were like I am sorry there was an error A Wizard Alone does not release in paperback here until October .They publishers are EVIL!

[Kathy Li]

Well, all the variant spelling/punctuatiions on "dai stiho" could be explained as different attempts to Romanize the phrase in the Speech as it sounds to English-speaking Americans. Y'know, like the Wade-Giles "Peking" vs. Pinyin's "Beijing."

Was just re-reading The Door Into Shadow and suddenly ran into stihe as the Dracon word for be/do, and given the Draconic mindset in the Middle Kingdoms, I'd be willing to put my vote behind "stiheh" as the way that a plural-being conjugates their number into a verb.

[Dreamwinder]

This is all so crazy i just think that it means cousin and its kinda like a precher,preist etc... that yu call them father its the same with all of it and it dosnt matter boy/girl or other gender....

Disclamer: I am not preaching any religion.
"If time has a heart it's because other hearts stop." -Book of Night With Moon

[Majutsukai]

I don't really understand what's so confusing about it... the book states that Pont uses ALL plural words, "even the adjectives" (Don't have a copy of the book on-hand to cite that right now, though). It seems like in his (their) home universe this is common practice because most life-forms there are plural(from what I can tell)... you could say it's a dialect. "Dai stiho"'s plural form doesn't necessarily mean that the speaker is addressing multiple people, just that they're speaking in that "plural" dialect. That's what I think, at least.
OK, I'm done rambling now. ^_^

[This message was edited by Majutsukai on 13 March 2004 at 23:24.]

[Dreamwinder]

I mean maybe it does depend on the number of people with you speaking. It could be saying like (roughly trannslated) we say hello, or we say hellow cousin.

If time has a heart it's because other hearts stop -Book of Night with Moon

[sylvar]

It takes a corpus (and a native speaker) to build a grammar

I've got a bachelor's degree in linguistics, which means I know just enough to be dangerous (and no more), but I'll chime in here at my own peril. I've gotten myself into dead-ends of morphological analysis like this before, so I'm a bit better at recognizing them.

It's reasonable to infer from Nita's reaction to instead of that singular wizards generally use the latter form even when addressing a group of singular beings. (For example, in a non-canonical story written by Diane Duane herselfDai has a meaning by itself other than "[a casual greeting/leavetaking]".

It might, but compare the pair ( / Dai) to the pair (Goodbye / Bye). Etymologically, goodbye is derived from God be with ye.

If you were deciphering modern English using this sort of mistaken inference, you'd probably reason like this:

1. Goodbye means something like may you (continue to) be good [i.e., well].
2. We know that Good carries the meaning of an abstract quality of goodness/wellness.
3. The other component of the meaning of Goodbye is a wish that this quality be present for the person you say it to.
4. These words are very similar; bye has an initial voiced bilabeal¹ stop followed by a final unrounded vocalic segment, just like be.
5. Therefore, bye must be some form of to be.

It's convincing right up until the point where you dutifully check your inferences against the expertise of a native speaker, who will tell you that the language doesn't actually work like that.

And, yes, if human languages are similar enough, it's my opinion that it's possible for the Speech to have a suffix that marks number. But it's also possible that the final h is really "whatever consontantal cluster precedes the suffix", so that if there were a word in the same class with a singular form of , its corresponding plural form would be .

(Also, in my limited exposure to human languages, I've noticed that verbs meaning "to be" are more likely than most other verbs to have strange forms. For example, in English, most verbs are all the same except that you add "s" at the end of the third-person plural, like "I love", "you love", "she loves", "we love", "y'all love", "they love". But we say "I am", "you are", "she is", "we are", "y'all are", "they are" instead of saying "I are", "you are", "she ares", "we are", "y'all are", "they are".)

Language, to borrow a phrase, is not only weirder than we suppose, it's weirder than we can suppose.

¹Please forgive the misspelling; the word wasn't coming through the way it's normally spelled.

[dorotheia]

or several entities using .

Plus, a habit is a habit. Nita addresses her people with Pont's people use