[tlhIngan Hol] the problem with {naw'wat}

[nIqolay Q]

On Sun, Sep 12, 2021 at 1:57 PM mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:

> naw'wat (n) remote, small, desolate place
>
> And I wonder.. Why does a remote, desolate place necessarily need to be
> small? Aren't there remote, desolate places of the "big" kind?
>

What remote, desolate, big places do you have in mind? I suppose a distant
planet could be described that way, but I feel like the intent of the word
is to refer to places like (for example) a distant outpost in northern
Greenland or a small town buried deep in a dense forest. A backwater in the
middle of nowhere, to use more idiomatic English.

It's just that I find it quite disappointing to realize that a new word,
> instead of functioning as a tool to broaden our ways of expressing
> ourselves, ends up with a very limited scope of application.
>

Before *naw'wat*, we didn't have any single words for concisely referring
to remote, desolate places of any size, so it's hard to say it didn't
broaden our ways of expressing ourselves.
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