Posts about Reisu every Monday and Thursday

Thursday, May 27, 2010

Fufai

After having only a broken grill for almost a year we finally bought a new one. I had the first home grilled steak that I've had in a long time. And boyfriend cooks amazing things on the grill, especially steaks. He's got a Hank Hill like love of propane. So our house was very happy to day. In honor of that, this is going to be a food post, specifically about meats.

In English we have lots of words for animals that we only use when talking about meat. Beef, mutton, pork, etc. We seem to reserve these words for mammals mostly. Birds and fish don't tend to get different words. Chicken is chicken, duck is duck, salmon is salmon etc.

Not all natlangs do this of course. In Chinese the word for beef (牛肉) amounts to "Cow meat". I've taken a cue for Chinese for talking about meat in Reisu. In Reisu I try to think of no animal being above any other, and in this way the language reflects that. There's no special words for the animal simply because it's dead and going to be eaten. When talking about the meat of an animal we must remember the animal itself.

The word for meat is 'fufai', and we can pair that with the name of the animal. So beef in Reisu is 'fufai biho' or 'fufai bihomuka' depending on the context of the conversation. Reason being is 'biho' is a general term that can be used for many different large hooved animals domesticated or wild, although most commonly it refers to cattle. So if you need to specify cow specifically over another large ungulate like a giraffe we can say 'bihomuka', 'muka' meaning domesticated.

Below is a chart of animal names that we might use in a phrase with 'fufai'. 'Muka' is in parentheses if it's optional. If it's not in parentheses it's not optional.

CowBiho(muka)
ChickenVexumuka
PigHopi(muka)
TurkeyVexubila
SheepMukatoxi
FishXudo

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