Mónate paináute he Pai le Koa 24si

Héite lami lakaméhepo nuisai le Koa hetia, kapaináute lúaku-néisi kacimi!

Hekei kavoa kesi ticímiki kémeni i palili oasi pameti mono lacimi ela eso. Tamieko kasavu oma, kapatune kaímita oma. Hetikehe kavoa vime ninasicutekuvi kepi kacimi kocusunu, kocupamuta... konicutehienu ve le púhuma eso i hala aaika iuluhu.

Paináute iolo, nii, Koa ni paloha. Kavóase sii i vimuniko taa i vela, e ninateota komiilo kaseculilo.

-Iúliki, Váhumaa, 2023-09-13


Lílite la le Níkili / English Translation:

Warm greetings to the worldwide Koa community on this, the 24th birthday of the language!

During the last year this little language of mine has transformed from a mere considered idea into a real living language. It took on its own style, its own sense of self. At this time last year I couldn't have imagined how much the language would grow and change... that I would be able to call myself a real speaker after such a short time.

Happy birthday, then, my beloved Koa. May your next year be even more astonishing, and I can't wait to discover what you will become.

-Julie, Portland, 9/13/23

Embedded questions

This is a much overdue followup to the seminal piece on embedded questions and theta clauses from a couple years ago. These expansions and adjustments quickly developed in the weeks after.

As a reminder, the standard way to say things like "I don't know what you want" or "I wonder where my clock came from" is apparently via nominalization of the sub-clause, thus

ni-na-ilo ka-se-halu
1SG-NEG-know DEF-2SG-want
"I don't know what you want," lit. "I don't know the thing you want"

toko keo ka-sáti-ni (ko-tule)
wonder origin DEF-clock-1SG (NOM-come)
"I wonder where my clock came from," "I wonder about the origin of my clock('s coming)"

Figuring out these structures was a huge relief from my previous anxiety that I might be thoughtlessly calquing IE strategies, but once I had them in hand I realized right away that that fear wasn't really cross-linguistically motivated. A more familiar variety of finite embedded clauses is well represented in languages from many other families, and as such I really don't see a reason to ban them from Koa:

ni-na-ilo [ kea sa se-halu ]
1SG-NEG-know what FOC 2SG-want
"I don't know what you want," "I don't know what it is you want"

toko [ o-kea sa ka-sáti-ni i tule ]
wonder ABL-what FOC DEF-clock-1SG FIN come
"I wonder where my clock comes from," "I wonder where it is that my clock comes from"

As glossed above, these kinds of forms might see slightly different usage pragmatically, feeling a little wordier, possibly softer, possibly less formal.

Entirely new to this discussion are embedded yes/no questions. Here too a finite structure is possible, using ai "whether, or":

ni-na-ilo ai ta-cu-tasi
1SG-NEG-know whether 3SG-IRR-repeat
"I don't know whether it will happen again"

...and again this option exists against another possibility with a nominalized clause headed by one of the infamous ke-compounds: kema "current, ongoing," kesi "past," kecu "future, what would/will be," kete "possibility," kelu "desire," keki "necessity." Thus

ni-na-ilo kecu ko-ta-tasi
1SG-NEG-know future NOM-3SG-repeat
"I don't know whether it will happen again," lit. "I don't know the future of its happening again"

Similarly, with the other types:

kema kotatasi "whether it is/was happening again"
kesi kotatasi "whether it had happened again"
kete kotatasi "whether it could happen again"
kelu kotatasi "whether there was a desire for it to happen again"
keki kotatasi "whether it has to happen again

Any of these could be rephrased with ai and the particle in question within the clause rather than outside it: kete kotatasi = ai tatetasi "whether it could happen again, whether there's a possibility of it happening again." Here I have the sense -- which as usual will have to be confirmed in time by usage -- that the ai-type clauses may be more comfortable and vernacular, the ke-clauses more literary.

Obiter: in the original theta clause post, I was omitting the nominalizer ko in the embedded clauses with ke-compounds (i.e. just kete tatasi rather than kete kotatasi). I'm unclear on why I did this, and at this point I think it was either just a mistake...or I was getting a little ahead of myself with an experimental idea that ko might be optional in clauses lacking a nominal subject. In this event, we could also have e.g. niilo selóhani "I know you love me" alongside niilo koselóhani "I know that you love me." I'm not sure yet what the implications of this would be for parseability, so an official verdict is pending more rigorous exploration.

Bride of the nominalized clause

What should happen to a Koa clause with a nominal subject when the clause is nominalized? This has become a bit of an albatross. The last eleven years have seen numerous well-thought-out, well-intentioned, sincere attempts to answer this question; moments of satisfied relief have followed, but a seed of anxiety has always remained that we haven't got it quite right. As, apparently, now.

My last bid for a final answer, in which the nominalizer ko actually replaces the finiteness marker i, is odd to my Indo-European sensibilities but quite elegant. The problem -- if indeed it is a problem -- is that the literal translation of such clauses according to the usual Koa syntactic rules ends up looking anomalous at best and like word salad at worst. For example, a phrase from the previous post:

na-vi-ana po-mítitinu ko-cita
NEG-IMP-give GEN-bedbug NOM-bite
"don't let the bedbugs bite"

Here the nominalized clause is pomítitinu kocita "for bedbugs to bite," "bedbugs' biting." If I parse that phrase according to ordinary principles, though, it seems to mean something like "bedbugs of biting," parallel to e.g. poétete kocini "acts of kindness." So..."don't allow bedbugs of biting!"

Maybe that's fine, because outside of Loglan and friends the mechanism of language itself was never "supposed" to be logical: merely parseable. Which I think this entirely is, and as I mentioned in the post in which I introduced this, it's not so dissimilar from what Latin does.

I guess the point where I started to fret again was when I realized that another structure -- which I have also proposed for this purpose in the past, though perhaps for not entirely the right reasons -- might address this in an even more parseable form. The core concept here is that any verb phrase can follow a head noun as a modifier, just like any other adjective: thus

mítitinu veta
bedbug giant
"giant bedbugs"

mítitinu ma-cita
bedbug CONT-bite
"biting bedbugs, bedbugs that are biting"

This being so, it would appear that we could create a nominalized clause simply by -- on the surface -- deleteing the finite i entirely, and marking the whole thing with ko at the beginning:

po-mítitinu i cita
GEN-bedbugs FIN bite
"bedbugs bite"

po-mítitinu cita
GEN-bedbugs bite
"biting bedbugs"

ko po-mítitinu cita
NOM GEN-bedbug bite
"bedbugs' biting," "that bedbugs bite," "for bedbugs to bite"

This would give us an alternate, less poetic, more easily parseable injunction,

na-vi-ana ko po-mítitinu cita
NEG-IMP-give NOM GEN-bedbug bite
"don't let the bedbugs bite"

...which happens to be identical to the most recent proposed syntax other than the position of ko! Thus again

na-vi-ana po-mítitinu ko-cita
NEG-IMP-give GEN-bedbug NOM-bite
"don't let the bedbugs bite," "don't allow the bedbugs biting"

Maybe there's no decision to be made and the two structures could coexist, just like in ditransitive VP's like

ana ka-nosu pe-vii
give DEF-elephant OBL-mango
"give the elephant a mango"

ana po-vii la-ka-nosu
give GEN-mango DAT-DEF-elephant
"give a mango to the elephant"

I'm honestly not sure. I don't see a strong reason to disallow either structure, but the muse is also not sending me a resounding chime of rightness in either case. One thing is certain, which is that I am very, very tired of going around in circles about this year after year, and on that basis I'm inclined to leave both options in circulation and allow usage rather than theory to cast light on the question. I would be relieved for this whole area to stop feeling like a crisis after 11 years of ceaseless gear-grinding.

Of course, this discussion has completely omitted to mention the fact that another structure also exists for this same meaning, a finite one with ve:

na-vi-ana ve po-mítitinu i cita
NEG-IMP-give as/like GEN-bedbug FIN bite"
"don't let the bedbugs bite"

I'd previously confidently affirmed that these ve-structures are identical in meaning to the the nominalized ones with ko, but Nahuatl has been making some gentle suggestions recently that this might not quite be so. That's potentially a really big revelation that's still taking shape; hopefully more on this soon, once I'm confident I understand it myself.

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.