Talk:sewaxill

Can you add in a reference for this? I think it would make a great FWOTD (unless you have a better Cahuilla word in mind). --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 03:52, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm sure there are better ones, but I fixed up this one in case I can't think of one. I'm using a different orthography than the reference, though the only difference is at the end of the word in this case, so it's not too bad. The entry in the reference looks more like this:

  séwaxil̃ n., plur. -em   1. mesquite bean which is not ripened and not sweet.

As you can see, I only loosely paraphrased the definition (for one thing, I don't think of the pods as "beans").

I also hadn't really thought about how to show the pronunciation or the plurals. I've been doing the absolute singular forms first, and skipping the ones that only have construct/possessed forms, so I have more time to figure out the best format for the lemmas. There's a whole system of subject, object and predicate pronominal prefixes that goes on verbs, nouns, and even some adverbs, and the construct forms always have them. Cahuilla has a lot of affixes that act sort of like independent particles in some ways. Like many American Indian languages, you can have pretty complex, elaborate sentences with only a single word.

I also haven't been including the plurals- though they're pretty straightforward (except for the class that uses reduplication). They're not completely predictable from the singular, but that just means the dictionary lists the plurals. Chuck Entz (talk) 06:44, 7 October 2012 (UTC)