Sunday, December 12, 2010

Adieu to the shortest-lived particle

Tonight's walk with Sadie gave me some good Koa processing time, which has resulted in the following decision: I really don't need ki as an indefinite pronoun. I can get exactly the same pragmatic effect by just using the passive in presentation form:

(i) si pa ipo ka sahi ni!
ai (i) pa puhu le Koa ne le Niu Ioliku?

You may notice I'm debating the necessity of the initial i in this construction.

Now that ki is freed up, I can use it for what I discovered on my walk to be its true purpose, at least for today: the suite of obligation, necessity, and desire.

I had trouble visualizing it before, I think, because I was thinking of this having verbal force. If I think of it as adjectival, it becomes much easier: ki suo could be glossed as something like "in need of eating," for example; ki pa suo as "needing to be eaten." In answer to the question "What should we have for dinner?" one could answer: [well,] ka sihi i ki pa suo "the vegetables need eating" (or "want eating" if we're British). In the same way, I can look at my watch and exclaim, ni ma ki lahe! "I've gotta get going!", literally something like "I'm in need of leaving."

Of course, we'll still be able to use full verbs or adjectives to express specific concepts: things like ni ma tau ko lahe or (i) tau ko ni lahe "I need to go." But in many cases the force of these auxiliaries in English is more modal than lexical, and I think having this particle will make a lot of much more elegant translations possible.

By the way, a thought from Whole Foods today: one can translate Latin omnia quae fieri possunt "the gamut of existential possibilities" as Koa po a te tai. I think that's pretty damn awesome.

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