What specifier do you use with squash here? It's not ka, since we're not talking about any real, specific squash sitting there on the discourse stage, unless of course we introduce a new rule saying that ka is used in a general situation like this on the logic that it's always on the stage because it's all the squash there is. I don't know about that one.
It's not a for the same reasons and even more so: we're not talking about specific squashes, not raising anything to the stage.
In Koa writings of long ago, I once used ko here, as in ...suo ko sihi..., but this also makes me nervous. Obviously no one is actually eating "squashness" or "squashity" or whatever, so the sentence wouldn't be using the particle with its usual meaning. Given that there's no actual possibility of misunderstanding here, though, my "naturalness over logic" approach would tend to say that this might be a possibility.
Could we come up with a context in which this would be a problem? How about "I like cats." Using ko, this would be Ni hopi ko sene. This would also translate as "I like felinity." I don't know if this is going to work.
The particle that I threw in off the top of my head when talking to Amelia was hu. Indeed, this makes total sense when interrogative or negative: ni na suo hu sumo "I don't eat any squash," equivalent to "I don't eat squash, period." The positive gets a bit more Loglanish, though: ni suo hu sumo, "I eat some amount/set of squash." This does, of course, logically mean that the person in question is a squash-eater, since "some" here means any amount greater than 0 ("there is some squash that I eat"), but the unnaturalness kind of chafes.
Plus, does it make any sense with a count noun? Could Ni hopi hu sene mean "I like cats?" Well, using the logical paraphrase, this would mean "there are some cats that I like," which is not what this sentence generally means in English. I think a better translation might be Ni hopi po sene: "I like [all] cats," in the same sense as Po mehe i pua "[all] men are bad."
Then again, is the assertion "I like cats" equivalent to "I like all cats?" I'm not sure that it is. In a way, I feel like "I like felinity" is more on the mark.
A crazy idea that occurred to me in the shower this mornin, centered around the fact that we're not talking about either any real cats or felinity as an abstract concept. As such, none of our particles are 100% appropriate, which leads me to recall that, in some languages, objects in this situation would be incorporated.
Could this be a solution in Koa? Could "I eat squash" become Ni suo sumo ("I squash-eat"), and "I like cats" be Ni hopi sene ("I cat-like")?
Well, what would this mean? In a structure like this, the second word should be modifying the first adjectivally. To figure out if using words in this way would cause a problem, we're going to need a sentence in which the object could also be a description of the agent, something that's proving more difficult than we might have expected.
I think the most fruitful area will be if the object is an adjective. For example, forgiving the subject matter, take ta [murder] [evil]. Using "object incorporation," this could mean either "he is an evil murderer" or "he murders evil ones," obviously a completely unacceptable ambiguity even if we have loosened up in recent years.
So no object incorporation, then. Luckily, as it turns out, we already have a solution to this problem! Exactly one year ago (eerily), I wrote: "the predicate logic design isn't necessarily all that relevant to human linguistic needs; what I've done is to give that meaning to these particles in conjuction with an article, but to give them a more pragmatic/specifier-type when immediately preposed to a noun." Among the following examples are these:
po *neko = cats in general
poa *neko = every cat, period
poka *neko = all of the cats onstage/in the given set
So there we have it. In that case, "I eat squash" becomes ni suo po sumo, and "I like cats" is ni hopi po sene. And let's try not to forget it again a year from now...
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