Food

🍞 Food & Drink

12 words for what nourishes us.

LEKA	Meaning	Story
pani	bread	Italian pane, Sanskrit pāṇi. Bread shows up across Indo-European languages — pane, pan, pain, panini. pani is the LEKA shape of that ancient food.
riso	rice	Italian riso, Japanese raisu (the Japanese borrowing of "rice" — meta-borrowing at its finest). The grain that feeds half the world.
huruta	fruit	Italian frutta, French fruit, softened (LEKA dropped the f sound in v0.4, so f→h). The vowels of the original survive.
sai	vegetable / greens	Japanese 菜 sai (vegetables/greens). Short and clean. The Japanese kanji for greens is used in countless food words; LEKA honors that.
niku	meat	Japanese niku — short, useful, kept whole.
sara	salt	Spanish/Italian sal/sale plus Sanskrit sāra (essence). Salt is the essence — what makes food taste like itself.
mela	honey / sweetness	Italian miele, Latin mel. The Romance honey-word. Also: Greek meli and the same root in melissa (the honey-bee). Sweet things share a deep root.
tey	tea	Universal. Every language has some version: tea, thé, chai, cha. We chose the simplest — and it sounds like the word it is.
kahi	coffee	Italian caffè, French café, with the f→h shift from v0.4. kahi has a faintly Hawaiian sound now too — drink it slowly.
vinu	wine	Italian vino, French vin, Spanish vino. The Mediterranean wine-word, given the v that LEKA promoted to core in v0.4.
akua-i	drinking water	LEKA-internal: akua (water) + -i (dear/little). Literally "dear water" — the kind you bring to your lips. Distinguishes drinking water from water-as-element.
mana	food / nourishment	Sanskrit anna meets universal mana (the spiritual sustenance of many Polynesian and Native traditions, and the biblical bread-from-heaven). Food and nourishment in one word — body and spirit not separated.

How This Category Shapes the Language

mana is intentionally bigger than just "food." It includes whatever nourishes — a meal, a story, a song. To call something mana is to say it feeds you.
akua-i (drinking water) was the first place we used the -i suffix for "dear" — meaning small, tender, intimate. The same suffix gave us temi (beloved) and hana-i (tenderness).
Specific foods (apple, fish, mango, chocolate) are deliberately absent. They'll be coined when they're needed — use before expanding.

Status: #finalized