Monday, October 18, 2021

Big business in progress, pandemic edition

I'm sort of surprised and pleased to say there's been an awful lot going on recently, after quite a few years of...not an awful lot. There hasn't been time for exhaustive articles about everything, but I wanted to jot down the main points at the very least. (Incidentally, this post is a bit of a reference to this one from just about 11 years ago.)

1) I appear to be bringing back the phoneme /c/ after 13 years! I say "appear" because I've been mulling it over for about the past year, and it seems that I've decided on something because I've changed polo and sumo back to colo and cumo in my lexicon. My rationale for losing it back in that original post was pretty sound, but I've been drawn back to it because:

(A) I kind of need it for some additional particles that I could but would prefer not to live without
(B) There are enough possible realizations of this phoneme -- [S] and [tS] as standards, but also potentially [c], [C], even [ts] -- that I can still claim adherence to its founding IAL charter
(C) After this post I feel entitled to exercise a little creative license, and /c/ has always felt like Koa -- that is to say, Koa has felt very slightly empty without it -- and it makes me happy.

2) This one feels a little risqué, but I'm going to give it a shot: u having been freed up from its erstwhile role heading an adjectival clause, or marking a dependent clause for a minute, I've decided to try it out as a plural definite article. This means we can have an unambiguous e.g. ka sona "the duck" versus u sona "the ducks." This is the very first example of plurality we've had in Koa outside of pronouns, and in the end it may get vetoed, but I think it has the potential to be useful! It also gives us some neat compound forms: tiu "these ones," tou "those ones," keu "which ones?" pou "all of them," and so on. (Note! In case you missed it, shout out to Lapine: hoi, hoi, u embleer hrair...)


3) After several teacup storms in recent years, I've decided I do in fact want dedicated pronominal forms that can be used as predicates, as opposed to niími or similar. Using our newly minted plural article, this gives us:

nika "I"
seka "you"
taka "he/she/it"
nuu "we"
sou "all of you"
tuu "they"

Their exact use still needs to be determined, but at the very least we know we can now say things like tika i nika "this one's me."

4) So important that it gets its own number: now that we've got taka for the 3rd singular predicative pronoun, it's finally, at last, almost unbelievably, possible to definitively claim tata for "dad." Silly though it may be, this one word choice has caused me as much loss of sleep as an entire category like irrealis marking, and left me with serious rancor towards papa after feeling like it was foisted upon me nonconsensually. So now I can finally heal and move on.

5) There's been quite a bit of uncertainty about the meaning of the forms aha, aka as against hua, huka. Theoretically the corresponding members of each set both mean "something" and "someone," so what's the difference? Which should be used? It turns out that the answer is in the prefix: a denotes something real in the world not yet on the discourse stage, whereas hu refers only to theoretical existence. As such, aha means "something," yes, but specifically "something in particular." It would need to be used of a referent not yet raised to the stage, but definitely existing somewhere. Hua, on the other hand, would mean "something" in its more usual generic sense of "something unknown or unspecified." So ni halu ko sano aha "I want to say something [and I know what that is]," vs ni halu hua ala na ilo ka mea "I want something but I don't know what."

6) Similarly, we have both naha, naka and nahua, nahuka for "nothing" and "no one." This is less clear to me. The latter set is more correct in terms of formal logic, in the sense that ni na me hua = ni me nahua "I don't have anything, I have nothing." But we've never really gotten into it with negation across a clause, and natural languages are frequently anything but logical in this regard, e.g. Polish nic nigdy nie powidziałam nikomu lit. "I never didn't tell nothing to no one," in fact meaning "I never told anyone anything." I can't really see a problem with ni me naha for "I have nothing"; I don't think I'd even really go to bat enthusiastically against ni na me naha for "I don't have anything." So this one remains unsolved, but I just wanted to mention it out loud as something that will require real attention one of these days. (I've also played around with naa instead of naha. I kind of like it despite its extreme similarity to na "not." Just a thought.)

7) I've been omitting stress marking when penultimate and unambiguous. So for example natepanae "invisible" (penultimate), aika "time" (considering ai a diphthong here so still penultimate), but naíka "unacceptable" (clarifying the separation between the vowels, because potentially this could be nai-ka rather than na-ika). Stress is still written any time it's not some variation of penultimate: haná "unless," mílani "dear one."

8) It occurred to me that since alienable possessives are really bound morphemes that take the place of suffixes, they should maybe be written that way as well to avoid confusion: átoni rather than ato ni "my father." It ultimately doesn't matter enormously because the pronunciation is identical either way, so in the end it's probably an aesthetic decision. I certainly greatly prefer palóhani for "my love."

9) Verbal complements of halu "want" clearly need to be introduced by ko and I'm sort of embarrassed that I allowed them to appear without it for so long: ni halu ko lahe rather than ni halu lahe "I want to leave." It's very unclear what the latter could even mean. HOWEVER, with the return of /c/, we can make lu volitive again and assign the irrealis to cu from Lithuanian -šu! So: ni lu lahe "I want to leave," ni cu lahe "I will/would leave." This is so wonderfully practical, and delightfully clearly related to halu, I'm really pretty chuffed about it. It's also going to be useful in word formation, I think: like maybe luláevama "aspiring player."

10) "Whatever." For one dimension of this, I realized it's clearly ka vi tai, or more compactly kavitái. I think there might need to be another form for other uses, but we'll get there later.

I'm 100% positive that there are other things that I'm forgetting, but this is a pretty solid start. More coming soon!

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