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.