... so, in the time-honored tradition, I decided to borrow from Latin.
I was most interested in filling out an imaginary chart of sensory-related terms, but if anyone wants to turn this into a wordsmithing / English Stack Exchange in Miniature, have at it.
(I think this is iOS's fault, but it makes formatting posts troublesome, so I'm finally complaining about it: this is a multiline text field, but braille screen input does not let me add linebreaks. This means I have to turn it off, tap the return button, find the reply box again, confirm I'm still at the end, then return to typing. It is frustrating and unwieldy and still the best accuracy/speed tradeoff without an external keyboard. )
Complete the pattern: see / hear / feel, visual / audio / tactile, optic / acoustic / haptic, sight / sound / ? you'd think this would be simple, since smell and taste just serve quadruple duty all over their 2/5 of the chart, but "feeling" and "touch" and "texture" don't cut it. Maybe it'd be more clear if I said "light" instead of "sight", or used them in a sentence? See/look at the sights/lights, hear/listen to the sounds, feel/touch the feelings? No, that's not right. Textures sorta works, but texture is more the tactile equivalent of color/colour and timbre. So clearly, we need a word to mean the most basic unit which can be felt via touch - the tactile limen, you could say.
So, after countless minutes of research, and no pre-existing answer appearing, I dug through latin declintion tables until I found something that fit. it had to sound good in english, but make as much literal sense as possible, so I went looking for something in the passive voice. I did not know about the supline case when I started, else this might have gone quicker. Nevertheless, I found a candidate which seems to meet all of the criteria perfectly, even being an infinitive with a familiar plural.
So, one sees light/lights, hears sound/sounds, and feels tactum/tacta. And someone not bothering with Latin pluralization and going with tactums isn't so bad as some of the pluralization-of-classical-words fails that are become commonplace. In this case, though, i'd expect tacta to be used at least as, if not more commonly than tactum, sorta like bacteria is more used than bacterium. And, well, light and sound can be uncountable, and infinitives kinda tend to be uncountable "so far as verbs go, at least), so we're probably good either way. Now, if only some amazingly effective innovation would make these useful...But wait, what about the Emperor? I mean... what about palpable? I didn't spend as much time on this one, so I don't really remember. Palpo / palpatum / palpatibam sound ... fun? Palpo is "i feel", (compare to tango, "I touch"). i forget the other two. (To be clear, tactum = "[that which is] to be touched".)
I thought I had, like, at least 3, going in. Huh. Well, English totally needs a simple equivalent to Japanese "ne". Even French let's "n'est-ce pas" be used generically, even though it literally means "isn't it?" Now, "ain't" got generalized long ago, but personally I'd rather "ain't" be the refusal to pronounce "amn't" it started out as, so I ain't using "ain't it" for the English equivalent of "ne". Maybe I should just start speaking Canadian English...
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
George... Don't do that.