Worthy of brief mention, summer 2023 edition

In the spirit of a belated spring cleaning, I hereby present the following list of topics with which my Koa process document is beginning slightly to overflow. These seem like they probably ought to be mentioned, but have been patiently waiting because they may not merit an entire post all to themselves.

1) Words for "something" and "nothing" have been all over the place through the years. Most recently we were fretting about aha "something in particular" vs apparently hua "something in general, something unknown," but at some point late last year I realized that (A) this is needlessly complicated, and (B) aha/aka for "something/someone" didn't really make any sense because a- is not a formative anywhere else in the language. This leaves us with a much simpler hua/huka for "something/someone."

"Nothing" and "no one" have traditionally been nahua/nahuka, literally "not anything/anyone," and those forms still exist as options. Completely unique within the grammar of Koa, though, there is now another standard allomorph for "no one," naka, and two others for "nothing:" naha and naa. Naha is the preferred form where naa might create ambiguity with na "not," in practice essentially whenever it constitutes the whole NP by itself: naha i (na)cuapu "nothing will help." Naa shows up elsewhere, in particular when preceded by adjunct particles: nenaa "nowhere," henaa "never."

2) As the careful reader may have noticed from the foregoing exposition, we're still nowhere near a decision about how to construct clauses with negative pronouns. Should "I don't want anything" be nihalu naha "I want nothing," ninahalu hua "I don't want anything," or ninahalu naha "I don't want nothing?" Or are these all acceptable? I suppose I'm saying this out loud as incentive to finally get my head on straight about it sometime this year.

3) Subject pronouns are only required in complement clauses when they differ from that of the matrix clause. Thus nihalu komene "I want to go," not *nihalu konimene -- cf. nihalu kotamene "I want her to go." Similarly,

ni-si-lule ko-io-na-cu-náe-se
1SG-ANT-think NOM-STAT-NEG-IRR-see-2SG
"I thought I wasn't going to see you anymore"

...compared to

ni-si-lule ko-ta-io-na-cu-náe-se
1SG-ANT-think NOM-3SG-STAT-NEG-IRR-see-2SG
"I thought she wasn't going to see you anymore"

4) I've alluded to the fact but never said outright that "before" and "after" are verbs, not prepositions: koe "precede in time" and hala "follow in time." Thus

ka-élate ni-nánaka i koe ka-kémeni
DEF-life 1SG-grandfather FIN precede DEF-mine
"my grandfather's life preceded mine" or "my grandfather's life was before mine."

5) It appears that Koa may have an emergent future/nonfuture distinction, in contrast to the more familiar past/nonpast orientation of e.g. Old English or Finnish: bare verbs can be interpreted to have either present or past meaning, but the future -- I think -- must be marked with the irrealis cu. Thus nináese "I see you" (usually) or "I saw you," but nicunáese "I will see you"; nisúsota "I kissed her" (usually) or "I kiss her," but nicusúsota "I will kiss her." I think this is pretty cool! Now that I think about it this is also what accidentally happened in Seadi, which raises interesting questions about the structure of my brain...

6) I've struggled with presentative structures in Koa. For a very long time I used the focalizer sa to try to do this work, before finally realizing a few years ago that I was confusing different kinds of fronting. I really wanted to be able to achieve something like the Polish szła dzieweczka do laseczka, lit. "went a girl into the forest," when the whole scene is introduced and no topic has been defined yet. It was such a problem that I couldn't even translate the first sentence of Are You My Mother?, "A mother bird sat on her egg."

Boarding the plane home from Dallas once, though, I suddenly thought of a very idiomatic Welsh structure for this kind of situation -- dyma fi'n sefyll ar yr awyren, lit. "here I am sitting on the plane" -- and it occurred to me that Koa could do something parallel. Rather than just

ni-eki ne-léhukone ne-tie lai o le Tálasi
1SG-sit LOC-airplane LOC-way return ABL NAME Dallas
"I'm sitting on the plane on the way back from Dallas"

...which is semantically correct but pragmatically totally neutral, I can use the presentative particle vo "ecco, voilà, вот, jen" to do this:

vo ni-eki ne-léhukone...
PRES 1SG-sit LOC-airplane
"here I am sitting on the plane..." or "so I'm sitting here on the plane..."

I'll still need to work out the specifics of usage, but I think this might become an important pragmatic device for Koa style.

7) I've been reconsidering "7." For more than 15 years it's been sapi from Basque zazpi, but with the quantity particle pi we frequently end up with the unhappy sequence sapi pi... "7 of..." This is especially grating given my particular fondness for the number 7. Hitu from Samoan has long been an understudy, and for the moment I'm trying it out to see if it'll stick. I'm not sure I can bear reassigning sapi, though.

8) The particle io "change of state, already" can follow a predicate as an intensifier: tule io! "come ON!", ika io "all right already!" This is a little reminiscent of the Japanese particle yo, which is some sort of whimsical good luck: 美味しいよ oishii yo "this is delicious!" (The Koa particle ho is actually often closer in meaning to Japanese yo, but I'll take my wins where they come.) Similarly, ca "steady state, still" can have a kind of conciliatory force: ika ca "there there, it's okay," tule ca "come along then."

9) In the original version of Aika Konuku I had translated "so tired" as toa pi kiuni. By the time I was writing about it on the blog I'd realized this was wrong, but for the wrong reason! I thought it meant "that specific referential amount of tired," but pi governs a nominal...which means that this phrase would actually translate as "so many tired people." Oops. This is a cautionary tale to remind us that qualifiers like vaha "slightly, a little" ano "sort of," nai "somewhat," aiva "quite" and poli "very" must always follow their predicates, never precede with pi as I'd previously thought possible: kuma vaha "a little hot," not vaha pikuma "few hot people!"

10) I've translated "at least" as mocekie, literally "as the merest thing," and "et cetera" as e tei motoa, etm. for short, lit. "and onward like that." I think I'm pretty happy with "etc.," but for "at least" I've gone for a calque and fear that I haven't really taken the time to understand the semantics like I would wish. I have an intuition that it should maybe have its own morpheme, because there's this whole concessive thing going on that's way beyond the literal meaning of the underlying words in any IE language. The structure would be something like

X ko-ta-ia-holo ko-tule
X NOM-3SG-AFF-decide NOM-come
"at least he did decide to come"

or

ta-ia-holo ko-tule i X
3SG-AFF-decide NOM-come FIN X
"he did decide to come at least"

Actually I quite like that. Okay, an independent morpheme it is.

11) À propos de bottes, this sentence, clearly a critical necessity for fluency in any language:

na-vi-ana po-míti-tinu ko-cita
NEG-IMP-give GEN-bed-parasite NOM-bite
"don't let the bedbugs bite"

12) I just wanted to say out loud that this post brings me level with 2010 for the highest number of posts in a calendar year...and it's only June. I am so happy and excited that Koa has found its way to such an explosion of growth after so many years of slow simmering; as a life's work, I feel pretty proud of it.

Purpose clauses à la lettone

At some point in the past several years the allative la plus nominalization sort of unexaminedly became the standard way to form purpose clauses:

ni-lai lakoto la-ko-núkuki
1SG-return home ALL-NOM-nap
"I went back home to take a nap"

...or with a different subject in the subordinate clause,

ni-lai lakoto la-ko-ta-núkuki
1SG-return home ALL-NOM-3SG-nap
"I went back home for him to take a nap"

ni-lai lakoto la le Keoni ko-núkuki
1SG-return home ALL NAME John NOM-nap
"I went back home for John to take a nap"

I suppose this is plausible as an intuitive strategy, but I'm always suspicious of unexamined IE calques. This has been on my list to research properly for a long time. I still need to, but in the mean time I was recently reading a Latvian grammar and happened across a different structure that I thought was pretty cool. It uses essentially an imperative formation (Esperanto might call it volitive), and the purpose clause remains finite:

lai drusku atpūs-tos, mēs aizbrauk-s-im uz Jūrmalu
IMP a.little rest-SUB.REFL, we travel-FUT-1PL to Jurmala
"in order to rest a little, we shall go to Jurmala"

I wonder if the parallel Koa structure might work too, as an alternative to nominalization. Something like

ni-lai lakoto i vi-núkuki
1SG-return home FIN IMP-nap

Maybe? It's certainly nice to have options, and this new way feels a little more fluid and poetic somehow. One thing about this, though, is that it looks like a serial verb, but then the second verb seems to have different TAM marking than the first...which I think isn't typical for things called serial verbs? I'm also not sure whether we could have a different subject in the purpose clause:

?ni-lai lakoto i ta-vi-núkuki
1SG-return home FIN 3SG-IMP-nap
"I went back home for him to take a nap"

??ni-lai lakoto le Néliki i vi-núkuki
1SG-return home NAME Nellie FIN IMP-nap
"I went back home for Nellie to take a nap"

Actually I do seem to remember serial verbs sometimes having different argument structures from one verb to another, but TAM? It doesn't help a ton that my examples tend to come from pretty isolating languages without much tense marking. I need to review Describing Morphosyntax and probably Finnish, Turkish and Nahuatl while I'm at it...doesn't Finnish use some kind of translative suffix? Anyway, I'm clearly not prepared yet to offer an intelligent assessment here, but it's certainly interesting.

More about agglutination

After a lot of excited scuffling earlier this year, I confess I'm still no closer to any kind of formal typological assessment of Koa. At base, this comes down to the fact that, despite the fact that I can speak this language with ever-increasing fluency and it feels completely intuitive, I still can't articulate what the particles actually are: that is, how to classify them in any standard system of linguistic description.

If Koa is agglutinative and all these particles are best described as prefixes and suffixes, I thought, there ought to be some kind of template dictating how they combine. I spent a good amount of time diagramming all this out, for verbal forms, at least; it turns out that there is in fact a pretty firm prescriptive ordering of particles/affixes around their predicate. I made charts like this one, showing the 15 slots that verbs apparently admit:

The most complex "word" I've been able to come up with so far is kotapunacusivatesutásiluketu, "the fact that he apparently won't regularly have been able to finish rereading them," containing 12 morphemes (2 predicates and 10 particles):

ko-ta-pu-na-cu-si-va-te-su-tási-luke-tu
NOM-3SG-HEAR-NEG-IRR-ANT-HAB-ABIL-CES-repeat-read-3PL
"the fact that he apparently won't regularly have been able to finish rereading them"

Quite a bit of recursion is possible as well, which means that there's no theoretical limit on the length of a "word": for example kotaiasivamimuminúkutu "the fact that he really used to start putting them to sleep" containing two instances of the inchoative -mi- in different places.

Of course, the fact that there are ordering rules doesn't say anything about typological classification. Catalan and Bulgarian famously have very complex obligatory ordering rules for pronominal clitics, but I've never seen anyone propose that these must therefore combine with their verb into a single "word."

Perhaps these particles could be described as clitics rather than affixes, then? Unfortunately I have too little experience with complex clitic systems to have any intuitive sense, but I do notice that Koa permits pauses for thought between particles in a way that I could produce between verbs and clitic pronouns in e.g. Polish (ja się...staram "I'm...trying"), but absolutely never between verbs and affixes (*co chce-...-my? "what do...we...want?").

Can we just call them particles and be done with it? I have the frustrating sense that that word may be akin to "emphasis" in being a placeholder for actual understanding, and I'm not sure why this is turning out to be so hard for me to think through. As a person who loves to put everything in neat little labeled boxes, it drives me a little crazy...especially since the answer might affect my judgment on how Koa should ideally be written. I'll just have to soldier on as I have been for the moment.

One note: just because absurdly long strings of particles can be well-formed doesn't mean that they're necessarily desirable, clear, or constitute good style. That 12-morpheme word up there might be better expressed in more manageable chunks, something like

koputai ve nacusivatai ve tatesulúketu i tasi
NOM-HEAR-be CP NEG-IRR-ANT-HAB-be CP 3SG-ABIL-CES-read-3PL FIN repeat
"the fact that it's apparently the case that it won't regularly have been the case for him to be able to finish reading them again"

Even that's pretty ungainly. The world of Koa style has clearly only just begun to burst into bloom.

Stress-determined minimal pairs

It's been clear from the beginning that stress was going to be contrastive in Koa -- indeed, it is in fact the feature that allows predicates to be parsed reliably in a phonological, morphological and syntactic system like this -- but until the language was significantly more developed and I began to use it more regularly it hadn't quite hit home just how necessarily ubiquitous the minimal pairs would be.

I've studied many languages in which stress is phonemic, but never one in which many or most stress shifts in fact result in a well-formed word with a new, often totally unrelated meaning. I'll just dance right past the question of whether this is quite proper in an IAL -- shhhhhh -- and accept it as an interesting poetic boon. What puns and other delightful turns of phrase might be created by a skillful Koa speaker to play off of this characteristic, or what conventions might arise to minimize its effect? Here are just a few of a million possible examples of the phenomenon, marking all stressed syllables and separating morphemes for clarity.

First, stress distinguishes predicates from clusters of particles:

hána "work"
ha-ná "unless"

áina "land, earth"
ai-ná "isn't it?"

láni "sky"
la-ní "to me"

ia-pu-té "they do certainly say that that may be so!"
iápu-te "an expectoration"

Stress often serves to differentiate particle-predicate sequences from predicate-suffix structures:

nána-e "grandmother"
na-náe "doesn't see"

úso-e "sister"
u-sóe "the rivers"

líe-si "purplish"
li-ési "probably the moon"

káka-va "move one's bowels"
ka-káva "the coffee"

Lastly, stress disambiguates predicate-predicate compounds, verbs with object incorporation, and predicates with both an initial particle and a suffix:

suo-kítu "eat liver"
su-óki-tu "finish pouring them"

mai-túni = "feel calm"
ma-ítu-ni = "using me"

kuce-túpo "ride a horse"
kúce-tupo "a riding horse, a horse for riding"
ku-cétu-po "obviously a bunch of deplorables"

No doubt context would also be instrumental in parsing streams of syllables, or resolving ambiguity where stress is misplaced or insufficiently distinct; I really wonder just how much sense could be made of a paragraph of Koa in the absence of stress marking or word breaks, and whether I'm a fluent-enough speaker even to make that assessment. Might be an interesting project for a rainy afternoon someday.