Round one: NOT-YET, signed vs многоꙮчитїй, mnogoočitii
NOT-YET, signed (ASL, American Sign Language)
ASL is used in the US and Canada except for Quebec. In total there are 990 000 users, of which 408 000 live in the US. It is part of a language family with sign languages derived from LSF, French sign language. This is the largest sign language family as France was the first country to gather all deaf children and teach them the same sign language. Many countries, including the US, recruited sign teachers for their own deaf schools from France, which means they have a common origin and form a language family. Because they evolve as languages tend to do and are influenced by local village sign languages (a group of deaf people in a community create their own sign language, common where deafness is inherited in one or a few families) or home signs (incomplete signs for a bare minimum of communication that isn’t considered a language, common where a deaf child is surrounded by only hearing people), they diverge and become separate languages. In turn, ASL has become the basis of many sign languages in the Caribbean and Africa, often due to missionaries. Some of them are still called ASL and some are named after the country.
Motivation: Similar to the sign for "late", NOT-YET incorporates tongue placement into the sign which is very fun imo! NOT-YET is often needed for imperfective sentences in ASL and thus serves a very important role linguistically.
многоꙮчитїй, mnogoočitii (Old Church Slavonic)
Old Church Slavonic is an extinct language that belonged to the Slavic branch of Indo-European languages. It’s closest related to today’s Macedonian and Bulgarian, but was standardised based on the dialect of Slavs living near 9th century Thessaloniki in today’s Greece by missionaries, who translated Christian literature so they could convert people easier. Old Church Slavonic was then used as the liturgical language of various Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic Churches. A later version of the language called Church Slavonic is still in use in churches today.
Motivation: This particular instance of the word appears once in a manuscript from around 1429. It is the book of psalms, and the word is used in the phrase "серафими многоꙮчитїй," to mean "many-eyed seraphim," as in an angel. the "ꙮ", or multiocular o, is one of my favorite Unicode symbols and also symbols in general. In the next version of Unicode it's going to be updated, because it doesn't even have enough eyes as the original manuscript gave it! Looking past the ꙮ fixation, though, I'm a fan of angels and angelic imagery, as well as eye imagery. A single word for "many-eyed" is really cool to me, since I don't recall there being one in English. It's a useful phrase for more than just angels, like spiders, molluscs...
Which is the best word?
NOT-YET
многоꙮчитїй, mnogoočitii
Voting ended onJul 11, 2023
