Thursday, January 12, 2012

Back to null derivation

A core principle of Koa design from the very, very beginning has been avoiding the kinds of problems caused by inherent lexical class in Esperanto. By this I refer to the fact that, for example, the root komb- is inherently verbal, which gives us kombi "to comb" and, counterintuitively for me, kombo "combing." In order to designate a nominal comb, one needs an instrumental affix: kombilo. Martel- "hammer," on the other hand, is nominal, so we have martelo "hammer," marteli "to hammer," and construct the verbal noun with an affix: martelado "hammering."

I've always felt that this was a terribly sloppy state of affairs for an IAL, and would be confusing enough for learners without the fact that it's barely touched upon by the textbooks. Koa, I thought, would conquer this territory, by making the business of part-of-speech conversion completely logical and, therefore, predictable. Some examples of the way this kind of thing works follow:

ka kane "the man"
le Keoni i kane "John is a man"
ka moa kane "the male chicken"

ka puna "the red one"
ka ame i puna "the bird is red"
ka moa puna "the red bird"

ka lalu "the one who is willing/able to sing, the singing one, the singer"
le Keoni i lalu "John sings"
ka kane lalu "the singing man, the man who sings"

ka pa lalu > ka palálu "the thing sung, i.e. the song"
le Amazing Grace i palálu "Amazing Grace is a song"
ka iune palálu "the one who steals songs, the song thief"

ka ne ka talo "the one in the house"
le Keoni i ne ka talo "John is in the house"
ka moa ne ka talo "the bird in the house, the bird that is in the house"

All of these structures are 100% parallel, in a manner entirely different from the way e.g. Esperanto does it. The idea is that every part of the language should follow this framework. The problem is that I'm worrying that by doing so, I'm diverging seriously from cross-linguistic neutrality and, in some cases, basic common sense.

I've written about this before, but I think the time has come to do some more rigorous investigation of the consequences of these assumptions, and evaluation of their reasonableness.

One of the most obvious effects of this system is that a lot of basic roots in English get encoded in Koa via the passive marker pa. "Song" above is an example of this: whereas in Esperanto kanti means "to sing" and the noun form kanto means "song," Koa lalu when used nominally means something like "one who sings in an aorist kind of way." This is not an obviously useful concept to be able to express, but it's necessary to maintain the parallelism of structures.

I should note that ka lalu doesn't really quite mean "the singer," in the sense of someone who sings a lot and constructs their identity partially around this fact. For this kind of meaning, that is, something characterized by the meaning of the root, we have an affix -ma, so láluma "singer." One could also employ the usitative particle va to form ka va lalu or ka valálu "the one who frequently sings," "the singer." It's easier to visualize its meaning in the negative: a na lalu "a person who doesn't/won't sing."

If ka lalu doesn't have a particularly useful existence with its current semantics, I have to ask this question: what if ka lalu meant "the song" instead? Not because it's logical, but because it's highly intuitive and useful. Some other examples of this general quandary:

suo "eat" > pasúo "food" (see below also)
lule "think, believe" > palúle "opinion"
haku "braid, weave" > paháku "braid (in hair)"
siva "tie" > pasíva "knot"
komo "wear" > pakómo "clothing"
kaka "go poop" > pakáka "feces" (the most egregious: surely "poop" should be monomorphemic in any language?)

In addition to this kind of concrete passive nominalization, we have a lot of abstract active forms:

nuku "sleep" > konúku "sleep (n.)"
mua "die" > komúa "death"
moe "dream" > komóe "dream (n.)" (or should this be pamóe?)
ela "live" > koéla "life"
suo "eat" > kosúo "meal"

In all these cases, we theoretically have the option of equipping the nominalized base root morpheme with the same meaning that currently needs derivational morphology to attain. What would be the advantages and disadvantages of such a system?

Before getting into syntactical ambiguities, we can state right off the bat that this would give Koa that same frustrating arbitrariness of intrinsic root meanings as Esperanto. Suo above is the perfect example: should this root used as a noun mean "food" or "meal?" Esperanto chooses the latter with manĝo, but it could really go either way. I don't like the thought of having to look up and memorize the meanings of various derived forms of every word: the whole point with Koa is that it's all there, free to interpret, in the morphology and syntax.

Leaving aside that qualm, I'd like to see if there are any really conspicuous structural problems with this idea. One issue that comes up repeatedly is that of what happens when the root is used as a predicate: as things stand, there is no formal difference between a predicate nominal, a stative verb, or any other kind of verb. Thus, le Keoni i lalu means "John sings" and is identical in structure with le Keoni i moa "John is a chicken."

If lalu, for example, means "sing" as a verb and "song" as a noun, clauses like le Keoni i lalu suddenly become ambiguous. It could either continue to mean "John sings," or more fancifully, "John is a song."

There are three possible responses to this that I see. First, we could decide that this potential ambiguity is unacceptable, and can the idea right now. Second, we could point out that the second interpretation is entirely semantically anomalous and therefore the ambiguity is artificial: in actual context, the meaning would be clear. Third, we could eliminate the ambiguity by requiring verb phrases to bear a tense/aspect/mood marker: thus the verbal meaning would have to be expressed as le Keoni i va lalu, currently meaning "John sings regularly/habitually." This is not quite the same as the aorist sense of le Keoni i lalu, but we could theoretically add this to the arsenal of va.

Well, I have no truck with monosignificance -- all languages are full of ambiguity -- so I can throw out the first response. I'm not a fan of the third either, because (A) I don't want to have to mark every verb phrase this way, and (B) it doesn't actually eliminate the ambiguity anyway, because le Keoni i va lalu could equally be interpreted as "John is often a song." This means that deciding to make this change to Koa null derivation semantics would entail accepting a healthy dose of intrinsic ambiguity into the language, for better or for worse.

One good thing about this that I'd like to throw in before I forget is that it would also obviate the need for a helper verb. Thus instead of tei kaka "go poop" (if kaka is nominal, that is), kaka could have both verbal and nominal force.

Returning to ambiguity, I would like to point one thing out. In more poetic contexts, where potential meanings range more freely, I find I can easily come up with examples where this ambiguity would no longer be trivial. Take the theoretical Koa sentence ka ela ni i lalu, for instance. I don't think there's a problem with ka ela ni "my life" (this would be ka koéla ni in standard Koa) despite the fact that it could also be saying "my living one," whatever that means. The predicate, though, could mean either "sings" (i lalu) or "is a song" (i palálu), and given the poetic nature of the utterance, there's really no reason to prefer one reading over the other. Some ambiguity is, of course, acceptable in poetry, but this seems to seriously encumber the expressiveness of the language. I think this may be the strongest argument yet in favor of not making this change.

In terms of typological appropriateness, I really need more data. I can say that, from the perspective of the inflectional IE languages I speak, I have nothing to worry about either way. "Food" in English is unrelated to "eat," but transparently connected to "feed." In Polish we have jedzenie, literally the verbal noun "eating." Spanish has comida, literally "(female) eaten thing": an exact parallel of Koa pasúo. What do more isolating languages do, though? I have absolutely no idea. Inexcusably, I don't have a grammar of Mandarin, Vietnamese, Burmese, Thai or any other related language, but Bislama, Malay and Yoruba ought to give me something to work with. I'll come back with part II soon; in the mean time, I think I'm seeing some reasons to leave things as they are.

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