Changes to Koa

A lot of changes have been brewing in my mind since I last wrote about Koa, and I'd like to get them documented before I move on again.

An asterisk (*) by a Koa word indicates that the word is being used for illustration purposes only and has not been officially decided upon to fill that semantic slot.

1) The 3rd-person marker i is required in all cases, including before aspect markers: le Keoni i si nae... . This is necessary because si nae can function not only verbally but also adjectivally and nominally. Ka mehe si nae = "the man who has seen"; ka si nae = "the one who has seen."

2) It's important to note that Esperanto/English-style nominalization must take into account the valence of the verb to be nominalized. ka suo does not mean "the food" but rather "the one eating." "The thing eaten" would need to be ka pa suo, as we're talking about the patient instead of the agent.

3) Verb modifiers in many cases do not need special markers, as I believe I had previously been employing mo. For example, if ka puhu koa is "the good speaker," then Le Keoni i puhu koa means "John is a good speaker" = "John speaks well." We will need to determine when this type of modification can be used and when a separate marker (mo, etc.) will be necessary.

4) I am feeling increasingly unhappy with my 3rd-person pronouns. Right now we've got hi = "he/she/it/they", ti = demonstrative. I'm feeling like hi is somewhat too neutral in phonetic structure to stand alone in phrases like ni nae hi. One possibility is to use ti or li for the 3rd-person pronoun and another morpheme for the demonstrative. Foremost in my mind is to for obvious reasons. To sa ni na si nae = "that I didn't see," etc.

5) As of the last described version, I was dealing with constructions like ni ka talo. These are no longer acceptable. ni talo is now the matrix; if necessary, it can be modified as ka ni talo, co ni talo, etc.

6) I was previously uncertain about whether an existential verb would be necessary. Furthermore, it was unclear to me what the selection criteria would be between that and the copula for e.g. locative constructions: ka keli i ne ka talo vs. ka keli i tai ne ka talo, etc. However, it is clearly important to be able to express concepts like "Does God exist?" If not by Ei ka teo* i tai?, then how? Maybe Ei ka teo* sa? Hm. Clearly further thought is necessary. And, though I certainly like ohi for the negative existential, I'm not certain whether (A) we need it and (B) it's appropriate given the fact that there are no other inherently negative verbs in the language.

7) I had been loosely referring to certain particles as "correlatives." I think this needs to stop because it confuses the issue. This being the case, how are co and hu actually used? And most specifically, what is really the difference between a and hu? If these are grammatically equivalent to ke, ti (or whatever its eventual form turns out to be), etc., we would seem to have

ka mehe = the man/men
a mehe = an unidentified man, some unidentified number of men
ke mehe = which man, what man, what kind of man
ti mehe = that man/men
hi mehe = her man
co mehe = all men
hu mehe = some men

I'm totally unclear at this point on the difference between a mehe, hu mehe. It could be that hu is talking about sets, whereas a is referring to definiteness. In this scheme, a mehe would mean "an unidentified man" or "some unidentified men," whereas hu mehe would mean "an unidentified set of men."

Okay, so that's fine. The question is, is that needlessly abstruse? And if we decide that it's not, we need to rigorously explore how it is to be used to render lots of English examples.

8) What's the negative "correlative?" If we start with hi na mehe = "he is not a man," then ka na mehe = "the one who is not a man." This does not seem to me to flow easily into what we may (possibly) have bene thinking before, viz. Na mehe i koa = "no men are good." Given, though, this could not be interpreted as "it is not a man that is good" which would be Na (a?) mehe sa koa or something. But if we do use na correlatively, then doesn't ka na mehe end up meaning...uh-oh, we've confused ourselves. Let's back the truck up.

i na mehe = is not a man
ko na mehe = the quality/state/idea of not being a man
ka na mehe = an instantiation of the quality/state/idea of not being a man

Okay. We're fine until we get to the correlative issue. If we do use it that way, then na mehe i koa would mean something like "there is no set of men such that the members of this set would be good." Then ka na mehe = "a definite instantiation of an empty set of men," which is clearly logical gobbledygook and not actual usable human language. So that's out.

Thinking about it, I believe co and hu perform rather different functions than the other specifiers. I think they need to be "outside the parentheses," as it were, the logical symbols A and E. So:

co mehe i koa = all men are good
hu mehe i koa = some men are good
na co mehe i koa = not all men are good (in other words, the same as hu mehe...)
na hu mehe i koa = it is not the case that some men are good = no men are good

There then seems to be a pragmatic difference between hu X and na co X which also needs to be rigorously defined. The only problem, then, is the fact that I'm not aesthetically impressed by na hu. Do I need to find a different morpheme for hu?

Fine. So how do I say "nothing?" Nahua? Oh my. "I don't want anything" = ni na halu hua or ni halu nahua? Okay, two thoughts. First, I don't like th efact that I have these two seemingly identical-meaning constructions, like in Esperanto. I really prefer the double-negative to this sort of thing, even though it's not "logical" -- so that would suggest ni na halu nahua. But I do worry about the logic of the thing. I think I really need to consider typology for this one: how many languages use a double negative in this kind of construction? I really want to avoid this working like Latin, in any event.

Secondly, yes, nahua is not doing it for me. I will definitely need to find a new "some" morpheme.

9) On the model of Yoruba, I've been thinking that it may be okay not to have overt marking to disambiguate direct and indirect objects in ditransitive constructions. In other words, "the wine man told me that this wine is good" would be either

Ka sahima* i si sano ni ti sahi i koa or
Ka sahima* i si sano ti sahi i koa la ni

So, we've got

SUBJ verb INDIR DIR or SUBJ verb DIR la INDIR

Incidentally, this is another reason why the 3p marker is necessary: otherwise a sentence like hi si sano ni ka sahi i koa would be ambiguous with "he said my wine is good" and "he told me the wine is good."

10) Regarding the above: complement clauses. I didn't use a complementizer up there; is that what I want to do? Typology again will be necessary.

11) I had previously been working with

me = accompaniment
mo = adverbial
pe = instrumental

I now think that some combination of me and mo may be able to accomplish this task perfectly adequately without a specific "instrumental" case. For example, in my old sentence Le Aliso i si kani* a sono* late* pe hi kita* = "Allison played a pretty song with her guitar," couldn't we really say that "with her guitar" is modifying the verb, and therefore is adverbial? Why not mo hi kita? "Her-guitar-ly?"

If so, mo seems to be operating something like an applicative in that one language in Describing Morphosyntax, in which there's a marker for "with respect to." It would also very much resemble the currently woefully underexplained use of the adverbial suffix in Esperanto.

What's needed now is, once again, a rigorous discussion of the difference between me and mo. I say this because before I had the idea that mo could function as described in the above sentence, I had been thinking that it was probably fine to use me -- not "logical," per se, but probably typologically acceptable.

I have also been thinking that me might be useful as the coordinating conjunction between NPs, as opposed to e for VPs and sentences. This parallels many thoughts I've had in the past, and happily is reinforced by usage in Swahili, in which na means both "with" and "and." So:

Le Mia me le Iúli i si tule ne ka talo e (si?) suo a sihi = "Julie and Mia came home and ate some vegetables." I sort of like that.

(or would that be ...suo hu sihi? Jesus.)

12) That age-old problem with root-worthiness rears its head again. I have sahi in my lexicon as "wine." Does "wine" really need a root of its very own? Can I not have sahi mean "alcoholic beverage" or "booze in general" and then modify it either with suffixes or conventionalized adjectives? So "booze-wheat" would be "beer," "booze-grape" would be "wine," etc.? There's no immediate answer to this question, but it does raise the fact that we need to get back to work on the derivation system so issues like this can be more satisfactorily addressed.

13) To which I say, I was remarking to Allison not too long ago that I thought the only way an oligosynthetic language could really be spoken by humans would be if the juxtaposition of morphemes was more mnemonic than semantically logical. So we remember that "carrot" is "fire-vegetable," not because it makes sense, but precisely because it doesn't.

I've always had trouble imagining how I was going to use my mere 50 available CVs to effect every possible necessary lexical derivation. It occurred to me that I could just define all 50 of them with random but highly memorable semantics. Well, some of them would be more traditional, like diminutive and augmentative, and probably a few more. Disparaging, etc. But the others could be elements, like "earth," "fire," "water," "air"; colors, like "white," "black," "red," etc. Perhaps a thought. I'd like to discuss it with a few people before I make a final decision. Really, the question is whether, if I go down that road, I'm utterly casting away any illusion that this could work as an IAL.

14) Directionality with verbs of motion. How does this work. I'm conditioned by the Slavic languages to really like directional prefixes. But we don't have a whole hell of a lot of CV morphemes remaining, and I sort of begrudge their use in this case. One thought I had was that we could use serial verbs for this sort of thing, reminiscent of the ol' Spanish "entró en la casa corriendo" type. So

Hi si entra* colo ne ka talo or hi si entra* mo colo ne ka talo or hi si entra* ne ka talo mo colo

If I were really trying to serialize my verbs à la Yoruba, Thai, etc., it would look something like hi si entra* ne ka talo colo, but this is too easy to confuse with talo colo = "?house of running?" I would need to mark that morpheme as a verb, but if I do so aren't I breaking typological rules about serial verbs? I'll have to give this more thought, but it's looking like mo may be my best bet.

Be aware, though: is it okay that mo kita* = "guitarly," mo colo = "runnerly"? "He entered the house in the manner of a runner?" Is there going to be a separate word that means "as/like?" And wait: mo kita = "in the manner of a guitar?" Er. This is why we need that rigorous definition I keep talking about.

Before I go to bed, which I really need to do right this minute, there could conceivably be a difference between mo colo and mo a colo, as mo is a particle and not a specifier and can therefore be followed by articles.

Okay. All for tonight.