Exsiccated/Exsiccation - was trying to think of a single English term that could be the equivalent of starvation; like if someone was dying of thirst, but I felt parched isn’t weighted enough to fulfill the gravity of it.
In latin exsiccare meant to dry up completely, so that’s how we got here I guess.
Thoughts? Is there a term I have forgotten that fits what I was looking for?
Eskimos have so many words for snow, I’m not surprised English lacks a word for dying of thirst but have about two dozen words ways of describing how wet you are.
I think this is a misconception. It’s the same thing where people think Germans have words for everything. This kind of thinking usually comes from English native speakers, where compounding words isn’t really a thing. Germans can just stick multiple words together and form a new word. This is the same thing with the indigenous peoples of the north having a lot of words for snow. They combine multiple concepts into one word, to describe the kinds of snow. Many languages have this feature, English just happens to be one that lacks it.
Oh but we can! We have footballs, handbags and smartphones. But also, is there really a grammatical difference between a charging cable and a Ladekabel? A brake pedal and a Bremspedal? Gold medal and Goldmedaille? In all cases both languages just jam the components together without applying any special grammatical constructions. The only difference is that, in written English, new constructions must be written with a space in between. But in spoken English you can’t hear spaces (by that I mean: there is no auditory gap between words that is different from the gaps between syllables within a word)
With Inuit languages, it’s more than this. They form “words” written without spaces that in European languages would be entire sentences!
Inuit is an agglutinating language, so forms “words” which express entire sentences.
The lesson to learn from this is that the concept of “a word” is not necessarily comparable between two different languages and is a bit arbitrary.
Sprinkled, damp, moist, wet, soaked, drenched, sodden, inundated
English has far more words for snow than the Inuit languages have. And as others have said dehydrate and it’s conjugations serve this purpose in English, with dessicate and it’s conjugations for the remains.