On Sun, Sep 12, 2021 at 1:57 PM mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun@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.