On spatial orientation and words

 It's Day 5 of 14 in our quarantine. We are extraordinarily comfortable in a suite with AC, internet, a cooking hob, bedroom and toilet (It is non-serviced, of course, to protect people from us).

Having not left the flat, I am a bit disoriented - spatial orientation never having been my strong suit. (I'm that person revolving at the T junction in Orchard Road with phone GPS in hand). From the balcony we can just glimpse the azure tasi, ocean, and out of another window the outline of mountains (so that way is sul, south- the mountains are always south of Dili).  

Are you wondering how the compass points are named? Norte, sul, lorosae (the place where the matan-loron eye of the day sae rises), and loromonu (where it monu falls).

But if you wanted to say from north to south, you wouldn't say "hosi norte too sul"... you'd say "hosi tasi feto too tasi mane"-- from the female tasi (the sea north of Timor) to the male tasi (the Timor Sea south of Timor).

Some people say Tetun has a paucity of verbs and nouns because the same word carries multiple meanings (Can I say it doesn't feel like that when one has been ploughing through just the first 625 words in the vocab list). 

But it's true that the same word can carry quite diverse meanings. A suku is a village or collection of villages, but it is also an ethnic group, and it is also a verb; to suku ropa is to sew clothes, and to suku uma is to cover the roof of a house with thatch. Fuan is fruit. But fuan is also heart, or a quantifier for any large round object, like paun, bread. Toe is ain fuan, "fruit of the foot", words are liafuan, "fruit of the voice" and a commandment is ukun fuan, "fruit of governance".

You know how they say the Inuit have 15 words for snow? I don't know if it is true, but I feel like there is an extraordinary specificity of vocabulary for certain things in Tetun. 

The verb "harvest" could be translated

kee- to dig, e.g. potatoes

koa- to cut with a machete, e.g. rice

kuu- to pick, e.g. flowers, but this is different from

silu- to snap off by hand, e.g. corn cobs

taa- to chop with an axe or machete, e.g. a banana tree

fokit- to pluck with a sudden motion, e.g. rice seedlings (also used for nehan teeth and manu fulun chicken feathers...)

For rice alone there are four words:

natar- rice in the paddy

hare (HAray)- rice plant

foos (FOs)- raw rice

etu (EThu)- cooked rice

Mak nee deit! (That's all for now).