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.