Talk:himu

This was defined as "animal" but that appears to be incorrect. A Concise Hopi and English Lexicon (→ISBN, 1985) defines himu as "1. what; something; 2. important", and (homonymically) as "supernatural personage, creature, monster". Michael Lomatuway'ma, ‎Lorena Lomatuway'ma, ‎Sidney Namingha, Hopi Animal Stories (→ISBN, 2001), page vii: "Hopi Animal Stories, the title of the present collection, has no conceptual counterpart in the Hopi language. Anyone consulting the English-Hopi word-finder list of the Hopi Dictionary (Hill et al. 1998) will readily discover that no equivalent exists in Hopi for the abstract English notion of "animal." The phrase himu taytaqa, which denotes "living creature," is an attempt to capture the concept of "animal," but its makeup betrays its recent origin. Furthermore, the scope of the phrase is so broad that it would also subsume "human beings." Hopi operates with more concrete concepts such as tuuvosivi, "game animal," pok'at, "domesticated or possessed animal," and laayi, "herding animal." - -sche (discuss) 05:30, 4 March 2018 (UTC)Reply