Saturday, December 18, 2021

More about valence decrease and related phenomena

I recently talked about valence-decreasing mechanisms in general and discovered a whole mess of unanswered foundational questions about how they work in Koa. I'm happy to report that things look a lot clearer after a month of percolation and I think I can address all of them. This will apparently be the Age of Empires edition of Ea Opi le Koa because a lot of my example sentences are...well, you'll see.


Object Deletion

The simplest way of reducing valence, if you want to call it that, is by deleting the object:

u sótama i tuho ka lina
DEF.PL soldier VP IMPF destroy DEF city
"the soldiers destroyed the city"

u sótama i ma tuho Ø
DEF.PL soldier VP IMPF destroy Ø
"the soldiers were destroying [things]"

Valence in Koa is pretty free compared to English. You've got a verb, and the subject position is required (unless it was previously stated or can be assumed, like i kuma he tana "it's hot today"), but beyond that you can kind of free-form the participants in the way you choose and anything omitted either (1) becomes indefinite or (2) is recovered anaphorically. This latter reading could therefore yield "the soldiers were destroying it" as an alternative interpretation to the previous sentence, if "it" were some referent already established in discourse.

It turns out that at some point we earmarked -pa as a suffix to indicate an indefinite object, which means we could resolve the ambiguity, if necessary, by saying

u sótama i ma túhopa
DEF.PL soldier VP IMPF destroy-INDEF
"the soldiers were destroying things, the soldiers were going around destroying"

That's clear enough, but it's not 100% obvious what that pa actually is...is it some kind of pronoun? I thought so at one point. Or is it more derivational, like "do X here and there/haphazardly/with undefined results?" These days I think hi can actually fulfill the role I'd envisioned for pa back then (see below) so I'll leave it as a suffix for the moment with no further pretensions toward independent status.


Reflexives

I was surprised to discover last night that I thought I already understood this once upon a time, but I'm not at all satisfied with a lot of those conclusions, and I'll start from scratch here.

The most neutral way of indicating that a verb's object is identical with its subject is via the particle hi. This is genuine valence reduction in that the verb's object slot for the repeated participant disappears when this particle is used.

ni hi loha
1SG REFL love
"I love myself"

ni hi ana ti kánute
1SG REFL give this injury
"I gave myself this injury"

Note that ditransitive verbs can become reflexive with respect to either the direct or indirect object.

In a somewhat more marked way, the valence of the verb can be left alone but a reflexive construction used for the object:

ni loha niími
1SG love 1SG-self
"I love myself"

ni ana ti kánute la niími
1SG give this injury DAT 1SG-self
"I gave this injury to myself"

There's an added sense of contrast or emphasis here, so depending on the context this structure might tend to show up with focalization as well. Combining the two strategies is also possible with a serial verb, with even greater centering of the reflexiveness:

ni hi loha i imi
1SG REFL love VP self
"I love myself"

Semantic reflexiveness can come in via an incorporated object as well:

ni loha imi
1SG love self
"I love myself," "I self-love"

This gives a slightly different meaning, though: we're implying that self-love is a thing, and that the speaker practices it.

There's one final undecided point, though, of just how pronominal hi is allowed to get within VP arguments: in other words, can/should we say this instead for "I love myself"?

?ni loha hiími
1SG love REFL-self
"I love myself"

On purely aesthetic grounds I do greatly prefer it when languages have a reflexive pronoun (e.g. Polish golę się, lit. "I shave oneself" vs Spanish me afeito, lit. "I shave me") but this does potentially introduce a host of complications. Which of these is "I love my cat?"

ni loha ka sene ni
1SG love DEF cat 1SG

ni loha ka sene hi
1SG love DEF cat REFL

At the moment the sentence with hi is feeling pretty weird to me so I think we can nix that unless some emergent circumstances demand it in the future.


Reciprocals

In reflexive verbs the totality of the action applies to all subjects individually. Reciprocals, in which the action travels from each of a plurality of subjects to each other subject, are formally very similar. The least marked structure is actually the same as for reflexives, and context disambiguates 95% of the time:

nu hi loha
1PL REFL love
"we love each other" OR "we love ourselves"

The possibilities for overt disambiguation exactly parallel those for reflexives with the same minor differences in sense, using the word kahi "reciprocal":

nu loha nukahi
1PL love 1PL-reciprocal
"we love each other," lit. "we love our reciprocal ones"

nu loha kahi
1PL love reciprocal
"idem," lit. "we love reciprocally"

nu hi loha i kahi
1PL REFL love VP reciprocal
"we love each other [reciprocally]"


Object Incorporation

When a transitive verb has a general, non-referential object, the most neutral structure is to incorporate it: in Koa terms, to omit the article so that it modifies the verb rather than standing on its own as an independent object. This reduces the verb's valence by one slot and is explored pretty thoroughly (with surprisingly few differences from modern usage) in this post from 2011, so I'll let that explanation stand in the interest of brevity. This gives us clauses like

u sótama i ma tuho lina
DEF.PL soldier VP IMPF destroy city
"the soldiers were destroying cities," "the soldiers were engaging in city-wrecking"


Passive/Middle Voice and Argument Shifts

Though traditionally labeled "passive," the particle pa affects argument structure in a manner that's pretty unlike the passive voice in IE languages. pa "promotes" a verbal object to subject position, but it also optionally "demotes" the subject to postverbal -- i.e. object -- position. The structure thereby created allows the agent/experiencer can be elided in a way it cannot in preverbal position, and valence is not technically decreased (depending on how you want to define object deletion).

As such, pa verbs are able to say something about their patient without inferring anything at all about their agent or experiencer, or even implying their existence. In this way it's more similar to a middle voice:

to puku i pa tino mo vake
that costume VP PASS take.off ADV difficult
"that costume 'takes off' with difficulty," "that costume is hard to take off"

A more passive reading is possible as well:

ka lina i pa tuho he to kesa
DEF city VP PASS destroy TIME that summer
"the city was destroyed that summer"

The wild difference from IE passives and middles, and one that I would consider the most Loglanesque operation in the whole of Koa if it hadn't been rescued by Bantu, is that there is still an argument slot for the notional subject after the verb:

ka lina i pa tuho u sótama
DEF city VP PASS destroy DEF.PL soldier
"the city was destroyed by the soldiers"

For speakers of case languages, though, there's another way of experiencing this sentence that has nothing to do with passivity. It's hard to get at in English except in the most poetic of contexts; maybe if you start with "bright waxed the moon" (a predicate, not an object, I know) and then parse "the city destroyed the soldiers" the same way you can sort of feel it? But if you've got an accusative like Latin, you can just say

urbem dēlēvērunt mīlitēs
city-SG.ACC destroy-PERF-3PL soldier-PL.ACC
"the soldiers destroyed the city"

The pragmatic or stylistic circumstances where one might make this choice in Koa will still need to be established, probably in the very long term. In the mean time, we can also make the agent oblique with ci (instrumental) and give the structure more of a traditional passive feel:

ka lina i pa tuho ci u sótama
DEF city VP PASS destroy INSTR DEF.PL soldier
"the city was destroyed by [the actions of] the soldiers"


Passive Agent Incorporation

In the same way that a general predicate in the object position of an active can be incorporated, a general agent/experiencer in postverbal position in a passive sentence can be as well:

ka lina i pa tohu sótama
DEF city VP PASS destroy soldier
"The city was destroyed by soldiers"

Note that the grouping here is [[pa tohu] sótama] "be destroyed by soldiers," not [pa [tohu sótama]] "be destroy soldier-ed" -- we're incorporating a predicate into a passive verb, not passivizing an incorporated verb which would make no sense because it's presumably intransitive.


Impersonals

The subject position can't be left vacant the way the object position can, but we can use an impersonal construction to code the subject as unknown/indefinite/general/unnamed/irrelevant. This is accomplished with hi -- the same particle used for reflexives -- but in a pronominal position with respect to the verb. I don't think we've ever actually thoroughly mapped out all the preverbal slots and clearly should, but for now the general shape of things is

(SUBJECT) - PRONOUN/i - (NEG) - TAM - VAL - VERB

Thus with hi in the pronoun slot, we can say

hi tohu ka lina
INDEF destroy DEF city
"they destroyed the city," "the city got destroyed"

This is actually very often the best Koa translation for an English passive without expressed agent, because the implication of an actor -- whether intentional or not -- is still present. Note that the actor is not necessarily implied to be animate. Another example of usage:

ai hi puhu le Níkili ne tia?
QU INDEF speak NAME English LOC this
"is English spoken here?"

It's possible for a verb to have a hi in two different positions with different (but related) meanings!

ha hi va hi kanu, hi vi hake ko apu
if INDEF HAB REFL injure, INDEF IMPER seek ABS help
"if one injures oneself, one should seek help"


ENFIN

Okay this was long (again), but I believe I've covered all the questions except for #4, "can pronominal objects in fact appear preverbally?" Despite my certainty in past years that this should be possible, the short answer here is no. There's simply no reason to dream this into being, even if there's a way you could justify it as equal treatment for all predicates. I'm down to reconsider someday should usage seem to demand it for some reason, and in the meantime I'm pleased to say I think we've got a pretty solid system of valence decreasing devices developed at this point!

Thursday, December 16, 2021

Pe le Iuli

In the almost 15 years since I started keeping this blog I haven't really said anything at all about myself, for the most part because its purpose was process/exploration/documentation and I really never imagined that anyone at all would ever read it! But in case anyone is curious...

Hi! I'm Julie -- 



I grew up in Seattle, a child of Polish immigrants on my dad's side and an odd holdout population of rural Swiss-German-speaking Oregonians on my mom's. I've been studying language and linguistics intensively since middle school and started creating languages in isolation quite a long time before I realized there was or had ever been a community of other people with the same strange interest. Around 1996 I discovered the conlang listserv which I can completely unironically say profoundly influenced my art and my life. I went to UC Berkeley for linguistics in the late 90's and early 2000's and later came to the non-profit arts administration career track which is where I still find myself professionally.

My best natural languages other than English are Spanish and Polish, with intermediate and roughly descending fluency in Finnish, Welsh, Catalan, Russian and Portuguese; I can fake it in French, German and, on a good day, Hungarian and Turkish. I'm sort of embarrassed that there's nothing non-IE in there further than a stone's throw from Europe, though there's been a lot of dabbling over the years and I come close to sleeping with my Nahuatl textbook under my pillow these days.

Koa began in my dorm room in 1999, initially out of irritation with Esperanto (ne miskomprenu min -- mi flue parolas ĝin, iam instruis ĝin per DeCal ĉe UCB, vojaĝis per ĝi post la altlernejo, kaj havas pri ĝi multajn varmajn sentojn...sed ankaŭ nombron de, laŭ mi, kompreneblaj plendoj). I found myself wondering how hard it would be to really do better in an IAL: not just philosophically, but as a working system that was genuinely usable as a language. Other initial basic parameters were maximal cross-typological intuitiveness, a minimum of decisions that a learner might find arbitrary, deriving all structures from a small and clearly defined set of first principles, and seeking and destroying any unexamined IE calquing.

As I've discussed recently Koa's original aspirations to IALdom may or may not still hold, but after more than 20 years of continuous development the language is awfully important to me and maybe one the things I'm the most proud of. I really need to write more soon about the philosophy and history of Koa, but it's hard to pull my attention away from the latest crisis in nominalized clauses. Other upcoming projects include a proper bidirectional dictionary, literary texts starting with Are You My Mother? and eventually a thorough reference grammar.

Some other notable constructed language projects along the way include:

* My very first, Terran (naturally), in an old, middle and modern version. Middle Terran got far enough that I was able to translate some of Unanana and the Elephant into it: Qua meithë, meithë cróharon şona ájenou Unananai e şilanë a vë éşalau cá címion ton divi...

* Seadi [`sjæði], my main squeeze in late high school and early college, an ergative and highly emotive artlang with influence from Ancient Greek, Sámi and possibly the spirit of Láadan...this is the only project that had a real world-building story behind it, with multiple dialects and a well-developed system of historical change...there's a blog for it too, but not much on it unfortunately. Not many texts exist, though I did inscribe the inside of my first girlfriend's ring in it: Ciēla sēn ainā inie "may this love between the two of us always endure."

* Oligosynthesis has been a major fascination ever since I ran across Brad Coon's Nova in middle school, but despite an absurd number of attempts I'm still struggling to really get a system off the ground. After something like 25 years of work I finally have a phonology that gives enough roots while being pronounceable and even pleasing in multisyllabic words, but basic morphology is still holding it up. One of these years it's going to really be awesome, though! I can say things like adožíla "clumsy inexplicable love," qearhoju "apathetically drink to destruction," or iveinisui "he ate it with confusion, as if it were the first time."

When not holding a reference grammar, I enjoy singing and playing folk music on tenor guitar and button accordion, exploring the natural world and studying evolutionary biology and philosophy, traveling, cooking, playing games and taking long walks in pretty neighborhoods. I work for a jazz conservatory and live in Portland, Oregon with my two daughters.

If you'd like to reach out to talk about Koa, conlanging or anything else, I'd love to chat -- feel free to e-mail! I'm at juliet at hey dot com or @julietabirch on Instagram.

Sunday, December 5, 2021

The theta clause

This post would have come a lot sooner if I could just have figured out what to call it. English-language linguistics typically refers to these as headless relative clauses or indirect questions, but that's begging the question: there's no reason to start out with the assumption that what's actually happening in Koa must map onto a relative clause or a question. I'm going to be bold and use "theta clause" because these structures are sort of meta-encoding a thematic role; since that's not a term anyone would understand out of the box, though, you can substitute with "nominal clauses" if you want!

These have been an albatross for most of Kea's existence, an endless source of confusion and discouragement. Until 2021 I just couldn't really even approach the problem of how to express something as seemingly basic as

I don't know what you want

Somehow I instinctively steered wide of the most obvious strategy...it seemed like maybe a structure that felt that comfortable was making too many assumptions. The Polish, for example, would be

nie wiem, co chcesz
NEG know-1SG what want-2SG
"I don't know what you want"

The Koa calque of this would be

ni na ilo kea sa se halu
1SG NEG know what FOC 2SG want

Hungarian does something similar but precedes the embedded clause with a complementizer:

nem tudom, hogy mit akarsz
NEG know-1SG COMP what-ACC want-2SG

This would calque as

ni na ilo ko kea sa se halu
1SG NEG know COMP what FOC 2SG want

Was that better? Who knew? I think maybe what argued caution was that I wasn't at all sure I understood what was really going on here; given the fact that question words haven't ever been a part of relative clause structure in Koa, why suddenly pull them in just to address this complication? This corner of syntax rested in abeyance until this year, with yet another Nahuatl intervention.

Nahuatl produces these kinds of clauses just as elegantly and effortlessly as any other NP, and in the same way:

in cihuātl
DEF woman
"the woman"

ca cochi in cihuātl
DECL sleep-3SG DEF woman
"the woman is sleeping"

in cochi
DEF sleep-3SG
"the one sleeping, who is sleeping"

ca cihuātl in cochi
DECL woman DEF sleep-3SG
"the one sleeping is a woman"

in cihuātl in cochi
DEF woman DEF sleep-3SG
"the sleeping woman, the woman who is sleeping"

Koa works extremely similarly to Nahuatl in its predicates' ability to assume any syntactic position ("lexical class," if you must), and in fact all of these translate seamlessly into Koa:

ka mina
DEF woman
"the woman"

ka mina i nuku
DEF woman VP sleep
"the woman is sleeping"

ka nuku
DEF sleep
"the one sleeping"

ka nuku i mina
DEF sleep VP woman
"the one sleeping is a woman"

ka mina nuku
DEF woman sleep
"the sleeping woman, the woman who is sleeping"

If we can do all this, and in fact our ability to do all this is foundational to the grammar of Koa, that presumably means we can also say

ni na ilo ka nuku
1SG NEG know DEF sleep
"I don't know who's sleeping"

Note that this does not mean "I don't know the sleeping woman": that would be a different verb of knowing which, embarrassingly enough, I still haven't picked out -- savoir vs connaître. Anyway, none of this is controversial, really, I just wasn't clear before that I could use these structures this way!

Let's take a look at how this works in different syntactic positions. Core slots -- subject and object -- are extremely simple:

ni na ilo [ka ma puhu] he tisena (subject)
1SG NEG know DEF IMPF speak TIME this-now
"I don't know who's speaking right now"

ni na ilo [ka ta ma sano] he tisena (object)
1SG NEG know DEF 3SG IMPF say TIME this-now
"I don't know what he's saying right now"

Now, if someone really wanted to interpret these as headless relatives, they could imagine that there's gapping going on here underlyingly, like

ka Ø ma puhu "the oneᵢ that Øᵢ is speaking"
ka ta ma sano Øᵢ "the thingᵢ that he is saying Øᵢ"

I think that's trying unnecessarily hard to frame Koa grammar in a IE-compliant way, though. Maybe the trees have invisible arrows and maybe they don't, but the way it feels to a Koa speaker is that ma puhu or ta ma sano can be used as adjectives just like any other predicate or predicate complex: so ka sao "the right one," ka ma puhu "the speaking one," ka ta ma sano "the him-saying one."

The reason I don't think relative clauses are the right way to think of these is what happens in oblique positions. How would you say "I know where you live"?

First of all, you can probably throw formal grammatical relations to the wind and just say this, letting the hearer reassemble the semantic role from obvious context:

ni ilo ka se asu
1SG know DEF 2SG dwell
"I know the you-living one" = "I know where you live"

If you do actually definitely want to overtly include that "location" semantic, though, I might expect to see one of these if these structures are really relative clauses:

ni ilo ka se asu ne Ø (gapping)
1SG know DEF 2SG dwell LOC

ni ilo ka se asu ne ta (pronoun retention)
1SG know DEF 2SG dwell LOC 3SG

The thing is, I don't think either of those are acceptable Koa! The most neutral, least marked Koa phrasing actually uses one of those ke-compounds to recover the missing semantic role:

ni ilo kene se asu
1SG know location 2SG dwell
"I know where you live"

There's a really strong urge to interpret kene above as performing a relative function exactly analogous to that of where in the English translation, but that is not what's going on here. Kene is a noun, not an adverb, and so the more literal English rendering of the Koa phrase would be "I know the location of your living." Here are some other examples:

ni na ilo kepe ta ma puhu
1SG NEG know topic 3SG IMPF speak
"I don't know the subject of his speaking" = "I don't know what he's talking about"

ai se ilo keo ve ka pasuo se i tule
QU 2SG know origin MOD DEF PASS-eat 2SG VP come
"do you know the origin of your food's coming?" = "do you know where your food comes from?"

This would actually be much more neutral without come, as

ai se ilo keo ka pasuo se
"do you know the origin of your food?" = "do you know where your food comes from?"

The Koa clauses are often somewhat more syntactically economical than the English in this way.

ni co na ilo keci ni cu ata la
1SG still NEG know means 1SG IRR arrive DAT
"I still don't know the means of my arriving there" = "I don't know yet how I'm going to get there"

NB: the English glosses all have a definite object: "I don't know the subject of his speaking," etc. Shouldn't the Koa then be ni na ilo ka kepe ta ma puhu? No, in fact. I don't know how widespread this is, but in a lot of IE languages we have this thing where the head of a genitive phrase is required to be formally definite; in this kind of structure, though, there is in fact not a known, specific topic already on the discourse stage to be referred to with ka. What's really going on here is more subtle: kepe is the incorporated object of the verb ilo! In essence, we're saying "I don't origin-know his speaking." This is visible in other types of sentences where there's no clear verbal object:

ta ie ata he tana, ni na ilo keo
3SG just arrive TIME today, 1SG NEG know origin
"he just got here today, I don't know where from"

We can also see this in the Koa translation of "it matters where your food comes from": Notice that "the origin," when in subject position, is a po-phrase because it's entirely general/universal. That same meaning in object position is expressed by incorporation.

tava sa po keo ka pasuo se
matter FOC GEN origin DEF PASS-eat 2SG
"the origin of your food matters"

(Though I'm confident the Koa forms are correct, the above statement about definiteness marking is going to need some scrutiny in the future: either I'm painting with too broad a brush, which is entirely possible, or I've been misusing ka all over the place. For example, why is "my house" ka talo ni if it's not on the discourse stage yet? I think my understanding of what's really going on here needs to develop a bit in subtlety. Meanwhile, though, again, I think the Koa is right with respect to the topic under discussion.)

One thing I don't know -- and this is the case throughout the world of Koa dependent clauses -- is how we refer to possessors. How would we say "I don't know whose drink I'm holding"?

?ni na ilo ka ni lolo ka paípo ta
1SG NEG know DEF 1SG hold DEF PASS-drink 3SG

A minute ago I just confidently announced that pronoun retention is not used in Koa in these kinds of phrases, so apparently not.

?ni na ilo kela ni lolo paípo
1SG NEG know beneficiary 1SG hold DEF PASS-drink
"I don't know the destination of my drink-holding"

Okay, but then what we're literally saying is "I don't know who I'm holding this drink for," which is sort of sneakily avoiding the issue. The possessor is at the absolute bottom of the relativization hierarchy which is no doubt the reason this is turning out to be such a challenge. Maybe the way to do it is with a verb that means "own"; currently we have only the reverse, a verb that means "belong to." I suppose we could use a passive......?

?na ilo paoma ka paípo ni lolo
NEG know PASS-belong DEF PASS-drink 1SG hold
"I don't know the belonged-to one of the drink of my holding" =
"I don't know the owner of the drink I'm holding" = "I dunno whose drink I'm holding"

That might be respectable, if initially utterly counterintuitive! Let's let it stand for the time being.

There are a number of other types of theta clauses which, though unremarkable in their structure from a Koa standpoint, need to be pointed out because they're utterly different from their English counterparts. First, two more making use of object incorporation:

ni na ilo mea ta
1SG NEG know thing 3SG
"I don't know what it is"

ni na ilo noa ta
1SG NEG know name 3SG
"I don't know what his name is"

The other two use special verbs of being:

ni na ilo ka ta ila
1SG NEG know DEF 3SG be-like
"I don't know what set he's a member of," "I don't know what he's like"
(we've seen this one before)

ni na ilo ka ta imi
1SG NEG know DEF 3SG self
"I don't know who he is"

This last one is breaking some important new ground. It became clear when thinking about these kinds of structures that imi "self" at base really means "identity" (mathematical, not personal); as an adjective "equal, identical," or as a verb, "have identity with." Interestingly, in this single case, ka imi and ka pa imi would actually be the same thing, since either side of the triple bar is formally identical to the other! So niími means "myself," literally "my identical one."

In fact, we could express this sentence in at least three other ways whose semantic differences from the foregoing, if any, are pretty difficult to assess:

ni na ilo ka imi ta
1SG NEG know DEF identity 3SG
"I don't know what is identical to him" = "I don't know who he is"

ni na ilo imi ta
1SG NEG know identity 3SG
"I don't identity-know him" = "I don't know who he is"

or even

ni na ilo ta imi
1SG NEG know 3SG identity
"I don't know his identity" = "I don't know who he is"

I'm leaving that particular rabbit hole for some late-night philosophical discussion. What I do need to say before I sign off for today is that I think Koa may actually permit IE-style embedded questions after all, in a rather more marked way. In the interest of brevity I'll have to add this to the rapidly expanding docket of future topics to post about!

Sunday, November 21, 2021

Getting Koa's valence-decreasing house in order

It's become increasingly clear this week that I don't really understand valence-decreasing operations in Koa. I created pa very early on as a passive marker -- whatever that exactly means in practice -- and seem to have identified hi as a reflexive prefix, but that about sums it up: no further exploration or description has taken place in all these years. Here are some questions that need to be answered:

1. Can the agent of a passive verb be overtly indicated? If so, how?
2. How does the passive work with ditransitive verbs?
3. How do reflexives work? Is it just a verbal prefix? Or is it a pronoun? If a pronoun, can it appear in other syntactic positions?
4. Can pronominal objects in fact appear preverbally?
5. Is there a way to background the subject, or make it indefinite/impersonal, without using the passive? (Like aquí se habla español "Spanish is spoken here" or ווערטער זאָל מען װעגן און ניט צײלן verter zol men vegn un nit tseyln "words should be weighed, not counted)
6. If there's some kind of impersonal construction, does it matter if the logical agent is human or not?
7. What's the relationship, if any, between reflexives and impersonals?
8. How do we represent reciprocal action, and how is that different from reflexives?

There's a lot of material here and I'm not sure if this is destined to be a single post or several. I guess we might as well go through them one at a time...

1. Indicating agents of passive verbs

It's been a long time since the typology class where we looked at a thorough cross-linguistic survey of agents in passive constructions, so I've been extremely grateful for this paper by Edward Keenan and Matthew Dryer providing exactly that. I needed some help with agent demotion because I knew it was most common for them to be relegated to an oblique position, but it was extremely unclear which Koa adjunct particle would be appropriate. Meanwhile, the only passive agent indication in current active use has been phrases like

pa-lóha-ni
PASS-love-1SG
"my beloved"

From the above it should be possible to say

se palóhani
2SG PASS-love-1SG
"you are my beloved"

...and if this is written out with the particles separated, you end up with

se pa loha ni
2SG PASS love 1SG
"you are my beloved" = "you are loved by me"

This makes it look like passivization in Koa -- at least by means of the particle pa -- is in fact not a valence-decreasing operation at all! Instead, Loglan-style, the subject and object are simply swapped, with pragmatic consequences. Further examples if this is true:

se loha iu poli pi mehe
2SG love EXT many QUANT person
"you love so many people"

se pa loha iu poli pi mehe
2SG PASS love EXT many QUANT person
"you are loved by so many people"

Initially I figured this kind of linguistic backflip wasn't really possible for humans, and therefore should be considered inadmissible. The best I could do was to suppose that palóhani breaks down to [[palóha]ni], like we start out with "beloved person" -- palóha -- and add personal possession: now it's ka palóha kémeni, "my beloved person." Maybe it doesn't literally mean "the one who is loved by me"...as much as it really, really, really, really looks like it does.

Keenan and Dryer, though, point out that some languages really do do this, particularly in the Bantu family. Here's one of their Swahili examples:

maji ya-meenea nchi
water it-cover land
"the water covers the land"

nchi i-meenea maji
land it-cover water
"the land is covered by water"

Here there isn't even any kind of passive marker, just verb agreement with a different subject. Bottom line, this may in fact be a viable Koa strategy. What if we do want an adjunct, though, whether for clarity or for semantic or pragmatic reasons? One strategy is an ablative -- so o in Koa -- but that seems a little ad hoc and apparently some kind of instrumental is more common cross-linguistically.

Only...Koa doesn't have an unambiguous instrumental. I've deferred serious consideration over the years, imagining (or hoping) that other particles might be sufficient: going in a car, or writing with a pen, etc. When it comes down to it, though, I really do want to be able to talk straightforwardly about means. If kelo is "reason" and kemo is "manner," what would "means" be?

After a few days of pondering, I think this is important enough to assign one of our newly available c- particles to. Initially I'd chosen ca but no amount of familiarity seemed able to make that feel right, so I switched it to ci at about 3am last night and I'm pretty happy with that. So:

ni kanu ka tue ci kivi
1SG injure DEF finger INSTR rock
"I hurt my finger with/on a rock"

se ia te puhu ci le Koa
2SG CERT ABIL speak INSTR NAME Koa
"you really can speak Koa"*

ta miilo ve ka kala ta i si pa iune ci mola
3SG INCEPT-know REL DEF fish 3SG VP ANT PASS steal INSTR bear
"he discovered his fish had been stolen by a bear"

*Usage here hasn't been formally decided. Should it be ci le Koa "by means of Koa" like Hungarian, or mo le Koa "in the manner of Koa, Koa-ly" like Polish or Latin? Or (probably not) ne le Koa like English? Seems like ci is most appropriate semantically but a final decision can come later.

By the way, I may have also decided in the midst of this instrumental study that the word for "and" should just be e plain and simple. I've had me conjoining NP's -- influence from Swahili -- but I'm not sure what that gets me in exchange for additional semantic ambiguity (did I really buy a house with a car, or just a house and a car separately?). I can't imagine that letting go of this would upset any learner regardless of linguistic origin.

Getting back to the original question, yes, this kind of passive can indeed have an overt agent phrase: (1) definitely headed by ci, our new instrumental, and (2) maybe even as a plain NP that looks like a core argument. Still unanswered is what's really going on here with valence at a lower level, particularly in view of option (2), so we'll need to come back to this.

2. The passive of ditransitives

In English a person can be given a book, and a book can be given to a person, within the same apparent passive structure. What about Koa? The answer seems to hinge on how ditransitives are handled in active clauses, about which I'm honor-bound to admit sheepishly that I'm not sure. If both the direct and indirect objects are full NP's I think one of them has to be phrased as an adjunct to avoid modifying the other:

A. ta ana ka lelu la ka toto
3SG give DEF toy DAT DEF child
"he gave a toy to the child"

B. ta ana ka toto pe ka lelu
3SG give DEF child APPL toy
"he gave the child a toy"

??ta ana ka toto ka lelu
3SG give DEF child DEF toy
"he gave the toy's child..."

What's less clear is what happens when the indirect object is a pronoun. I'm not sure why this shouldn't work:

ta ana ni ka lelu
3SG give 1SG DEF toy
"he gave me the toy"

I guess we're kind of begging the question, though, because as soon as we're saying that both of those ana clauses above are acceptable, it's clear that it must be possible to promote either the direct or indirect object. I guess I'll go ahead and say yes, this is permissible, until I find a good reason to forbid it. For what it's worth I think Yoruba agrees. So then, the passives would look...like this, I think?

A. ka lelu i pa ana la ka toto (ci ta)
DEF toy VP PASS give DAT DEF child (INSTR 3SG)
"the toy was given to the child (by him)"

B. ka toto i pa ana (pe) ka lelu (ci ta)
DEF child VP PASS give (APPL) DEF toy (INSTR 3SG)
"the child was given the toy (by him)"

Oof, this is getting complicated. I'm not sure whether the pe in structure B is obligatory, despite the fact that it would have been in the active sentence -- once the two objects aren't piled up anymore, the ambiguity disappears! And while we're trying to figure that out, if it might be possible to free agents from an adjunct phrase like we were saying before, might this be an acceptable rephrasing of type A?

A. ka lelu i pa ana ta la ka toto
DEF toy VP PASS give 3SG DAT DEF child
"the toy was given by him to the child"

In this case, the literal translation would look something like "the toy was his given thing (i.e. his gift) to the child." Even though this surprises my IE intuition, I really don't see why this shouldn't be okay! And I actually kind of love it.

Getting back to B above, I think it's better with pe omitted: included, it's acceptable but not really helpful. It's the same as the fact that we can theoretically say

ni ipo pe ka cai
1SG drink APPL DEF tea
"I drank [with respect to] the tea"

...but the circumstances where a speaker would naturally choose to do that would be pretty specific. At least 99% of the time you'd just get ni ipo ka cai.

This is already long enough that I think I should leave 3-8 for separate posts...and I haven't forgotten that there's some really important material still waiting to be written about nominalization and relativization! I'll do my best over Thanksgiving break.

Sunday, November 14, 2021

A Koa lullaby

On the evening of August 22nd, 2012 when Callie was five months old and I was trying to get her to sleep, this lullaby somehow spontaneously came out of me fully formed. That was the heyday of real Koa usage, and I frequently spoke it to her in the course of daily life; for a minute it seemed not inconceivable that it might become a living language. That hasn't quite happened (yet), but the song itself -- Aika ko Nuku, "Time for Sleep" or "Sleepytime" -- has stuck around and both girls know it word for word, even if they can't parse it.

Given that this is still the only existing Koa text, I'm kind of appalled I've never posted anything about it! Here's the score, followed by an interlinear translation.
We usually sing it twice through, repeating the last two measures more slowly on the final repetition.

Over the years I realized I've been imagining the spelling as Aika Konuku rather than Aika ko Nuku as I had it in my score from 2012, but I'm not sure why. There's really no prescriptive...anything in Koa about word grouping or capitalization at this point, so everything is reflecting perceived aesthetics of the moment. Another topic for someday. Anyway, the words:

aika ko nuku la ka piku ni
time ABS sleep DAT DEF little 1SG
"it's sleepytime for my little one"

vo se io maka ne ni áheki
PRESENT 2SG TRANS lie LOC 1SG arm-DIM
"here you are now lying in my sweet arms"

toa pi kiuni i hala pai pui
that QUANT need-rest VP after day long
"so tired after the long day"

aika ko nuku la se
time ABS sleep DAT 2SG
"it sleepytime for you."

The third line has been a bit problematic. Through most of the song's life it existed as

toa pi kiuni hala a pai pui
that QUANT need-rest after INDEF day long
"so tired after a long day"

First of all, though hala has meant "after" since about 2011, it wasn't until this year that I finally figured out how to use it, and this isn't it -- there was nothing integrating it into syntax! This has been changed into its proper verbal form in the words above (a post about this is forthcoming). A is not at all the right particle, either...if anything it might make sense to say ...hala ti pai pui "after this long day," but really the long day is not being spoken of in any kind of specific way: we're referring to a kind of tiredness one feels after a long day in general, and as such the right way to express it is via object incorporation: no article.

Still an issue, though, is the translation of so tired. I picked a word for this out of a kind of Esperanto correlative logic, where you would genuinely say tiom laca "that amount of tired," but it doesn't actually make sense in Koa: toa pi kiuni suggests a real referent in the world for toa "that" which clearly doesn't exist ("I'm not this tired, I'm that tired."). What we want is iu kiuni "so tired," but iu didn't exist back then, and it doesn't fit the meter. We need more syllables.

se iu kiuni "you're so tired" (accent in the wrong place)
kiuni poli "very tired" (words too drawn out and accent on poli instead of kiuni. I think we need 3 syllables)
tótoki kiuni "tired little child" (maybe okay! Sounds a lot like the original; two successive ki's but it's still not hard to sing)
toto iu kiuni "such a tired child" (also possible but I like it less for some reason)
néneki kiuni "tired little baby" (since Callie was one when this was composed. Maybe?)

I don't think I'm making a decision today, but I potentially like some of these options. There may be a revolt, though...the change from hala a pai to i hala pai wasn't even noticeable to the little ones, but this one -- when I figure out a replacement -- won't be so easy to sneak past them.

Incidentally I mentioned to them at some point that I was working on a second verse, and since then they ask me about it every few months. I think I'm having some performance anxiety, as usual for me with songwriting, but I know it'll be something like

Aika ko nuku la ka piku ni (same as first verse)
Ka esi me aimo something ("the moon and stars will watch over you through the night?")
Something about no cause for worry when you're so loved
Aika ko nuku la se (same as first verse)

Uh...still some big gaps in there. I'll get back to you.

Saturday, November 6, 2021

The two faces of ke- compounds

There's an additional bit of preparation we need before diving into that thorough discussion of nominalization, relativization and focus that I keep promising: an understanding of the formative ke-.

This particle, by default carrying interrogative meaning, can be productively preposed to a second particle to form compounds that look and behave like predicates. There has traditionally been a sharp divide between two classes of resultant forms, though, depending on whether the second particle is an article (a, ka, le, and most recently u) or not.

1. When added to an article, ke- forms an interrogative pronoun. These solicit a response of the type indicated by the article itself, so:

kea = indefinite, "what?"
keka = definite, "who/which one?"
keu = definite plural, "who all, which ones?"
kele = name, "what is the name?"

2. When added to any other kind of particle, however, these lose interrogative force and instead give us a sort of meta-description of the meaning of that particle. There are lots of these, so for example:

kene = location
kela = destination
keme = attribute
kemo = manner
kehe = time (at which something occurs), moment
kepe = subject, topic, respect, regard
kelo = reason, cause
kesi = that which went before, past
kepi = amount, quantity
kecu = that which will be, future
kema = that which is ongoing; current?
kete = possibility
keki = necessity
kelu = a desire
kena = that which is not; negative?
keha = condition (that which "ifs")

These should all be spelled out and explained at some point -- I was sure I wrote a post about this back in the 20-teens, but it would appear I never got around to it! And it would be good to do this before I accidentally assign those roots to other meanings (see point 5 below).

3. In one case the resultant form has been modified a bit:

kia = affirmative (not keia which is of an inadmissible form for a predicate; curiously this was not an intentional choice, but an accident based loosely on Finnish kyllä "certainly"!)

4. Forms with other specifiers would have no identifiable meaning and so aren't included in this set: keko, kehu, kepo, keti, keto.

5. Note that there are other words of this apparent form which in fact are their own bisyllabic roots:

keli "language"
kevi "light in weight"

This was not planned out particularly well, and in fact keli could and really should also mean "hypothetical" and kevi "a command." I'm not sure what to do about this...either we could have homonyms in a breathtaking change of allegiance in favor of Koa's rights as an artlang, or maybe those roots need to be reconsidered. I honestly don't love keli -- it somehow utterly fails to capture what I love about Finnish kieli -- and kevi could become kevu. Or something. OR I could create different roots for the meanings that either or both of these "should" have with the ke- formative: I think the "command" root should start with transitive verbal meaning, for one, rather than "that which is commanded."

Incidentally, I don't think I've ever mentioned out loud just how many Koa roots are in fact unapologetically borrowed from Finnish. Paa "head," kume "ten," sata "hundred," tuha "thousand," ela "live," kusu "ask," nuku "sleep," poi "away," voi "be able," tule "come," mene "go," lahe "leave," soi "sound, ring," iso "big," suli "great," sini "blue," puna "red," lepa "bread," vai "butter," vate "cloth," puhu "speak," sano "say," hulu "crazy," ike "cry," pime "dark," valo "light," pai "day," suva "deep," vake "difficult," vami "ready," ovi "door," ava "open," asu "dwell," suo "eat," vela "even," paha "evil," pele "family," vaha "few," luta "find," kala "fish," hisi "mist," uto "foreign," uno "forget," ana "give," hei "hello," moi "goodbye," vihe "green," sivu "leaf," pusu "gun," kova "hard," kulu "hear," apu "help," koke "high," maki "hill," koto "home," talo "house," asi "idea," tapa "kill," maa "land," keli "language," vime "last," liu "lead," opi "learn," kile "write," vesi "liquid," nae "see," hake "look for," mata "low," kone "machine," and on and on. In some cases the form or meaning has obviously been adapted. I'm not sure why, but something about Finnish phonology really lends itself to the vibe I've been going for with Koa from the beginning.

ANYWAY, it occurred to me the other day that if kea literally breaks down to ke a -- in other words, "which indefinite thing beginning with a?" -- is it possible that non-article compounds should have interrogative force as well? Couldn't kene mean "which phrase beginning with ne," i.e. "where?" Suddenly a whole cast of what Esperanto might call correlatives effortlessly unfolds:

kene - tine - tone = where - here - there
kela - tila - tola = whither - hither - thither
kehe - tihe - tohe = when - now - then
kemo - timo - tomo = how - like this - like that
kelo - tilo - tolo = why - for this reason - for that reason
kepi - tipi - topi = how much - this much - that much

For a moment it seemed like, despite the fact that I kind of hate nearly every single one of those forms with those meanings on aesthetic grounds, it may be a logical necessity to allow this. In other words, "why" would also mean "reason," as in "let me tell you about the how and why." It felt inelegant and unappealing, but maybe important in the service of internal consistency.

But thankfully for my aesthetic sensibilities, these correlatives weren't meant to be. The reason it works with kea - tia - toa and friends is that the resultant pronouns have a semantic that allows them to be integrated into syntax just like any other predicate (albeit with the article integrated inside of itself, so to speak). We can say

ni na suo toa
1SG NEG eat that
"I didn't eat that"

...in exactly the same way we can say

ni na suo lepa
1SG NEG eat bread
"I didn't eat bread"

But the compounds with other particle types would produce something that otherwise does not exist as a category anywhere in Koa: adverbials! If one said

ni si asu tone
1SG ANT dwell 'there'
"I used to live there"

...in order to parse it correctly, they would have to know that tone should not be interpreted according to the ordinary rules of Koa: that is, not as a direct object or a modifier, as one predicate following another. To allow these would be to introduce a genuine lexical class division among predicates into the language for the first time, and a completely externally unidentifiable one at that. Ick. Might as well hang it all up and start over if I'm going to throw out the most basic guiding light of the language. It has to be, as it always has been,

ni si asu ne toa
1SG ANT dwell LOC that
"I used to live there"

So then, feeling pretty solid about the system of ke- compounds and why things mean what they do, let's remember all those words under point 2 above (kene "location," kemo "manner," and so on), because they're going to be critical when we start trying to nominalize more complex clauses.

P.S. I'm feeling less and less sure about u as a plural definite article. I realized today that this would make "everyone" have to be pou instead of poka, which makes me sad, but beyond that I'm having some trouble being convinced that it feels very much like Koa. No final decisions but that's where I'm at. Note that if we keep it, we'll have series like this: poa "everything," poka "all of it," pou "everyone."

Friday, November 5, 2021

Kion fari?

A small break in the action: "what to do?"

This has been irritating me of late, because it's such a simple little structure in the languages I know best, but I could not figure out how to express it in Koa. First attempt: Kea sa kipaete? Literally "what is to be done?" But this has...so many morphemes. I'm wondering whether there might be something like Kea sa ete? I think this would be a focalization of ete kea? meaning literally "do what?" Actually either of those Koa sentences seem like they could work, looking at it like that, and in fact the latter feels like it might retain more of the vibe of the original: it's not really a focused sentence pragmatically, more a general neutral statement about a situation.

Incidentally, in the realm of little useful Koa phrases, I forgot to mention the translation of "OMG" that Allison and I worked out back in April! The Koa version is OVN, short for oo vala ni. I meant to start integrating that into my texting but somehow haven't managed it yet...

Representing verbal focus and lexical class

Based on the conclusions of the previous post, for about five minutes I thought we might be seeing the end of sa as a focus particle in favor of constructions with i ka. It was a little scary but also bold and exciting...I wrote:

"Kea sa se ma sano? is exactly equivalent to
     Ka se ma sano i kea?
     Kea i ka se ma sano?

If we do this, movement rules are completely eliminated. You can superficially 'front' things, as above, but it's then following the same grammatical/syntactic rules, not inventing a new one. We've never fully explored the implications of our ability to add specifiers to clauses, and this is potentially one of them."

Before that line of thought had really gotten going, though, I realized that it ran into irreconcilable difficulties if the focused constituent is a verb rather than its subject or object. For example, if we start with ka tálate i neni "the attempt was in vain," how do we focus "in vain?"

Neni sa ka tálate =
     Neni i ka ka tálate...............?

We end up with "Vain is what the attempt..." and then nothing. What should go in that space? A similar problem comes up in other circumstances when using a specifier with a verb, for example:

Kea sa ta? "What's he like?" -> Ni na ilo ka ta...........? "I don't know what he's like"

What completes these sentences? Is there a dummy verb? If there is one, then there must be a way to use it in non-nominalized clauses too, like

ta ila koke "he be's tall" (ila borrowed from Lithuanian yra incidentally)
ni na ilo ka ta ila "I don't know what he's like"

The only thing about this is that if ta ila koke means the same as ta koke, then technically shouldn't ta lalu be equivalent to ta ila lalu...like "he's a singer," "he's a singing one," rather than just "he sings"? I suppose ila could have an underlying meaning something like "X is a member of set Y."

This is getting a little sidetracked from the original topic, but speaking of dummy verbs, if I ask Kea sa se ete? "What are you doing?", why can't the answer be an adjective? In other words, why should we assume that the predicate ete is replacing must be verbal rather than adjectival? Why does Kea sa se ete not just mean "what predicate defines the set you are a part of?", just the same as ila above?

BECAUSE, I realize, ete doesn't exactly mean "do." It means "verb"!!!! Without intending to, I created words that allow specificity with respect to the semantic of lexical class, since Koa entirely lacks this concept formally. Check this out:

ete "do the action of predicate X" = "verb"
ila "be a member of set X" = "adjective"
mea "an instantiation of predicate X" = "noun"

This is really pretty exciting. Suddenly we can say things like

na vi ila hulu
NEG IMP 'adjective' crazy
"don't be crazy," as in "don't act crazy"

na vi hulu
NEG IMP crazy
"don't (actually) be crazy"

na vi ila toa
NEG IMP 'adjective' that
"don't be like that"

And there's a fine distinction that can be made between things like

ta ete lalu
3SG 'verb' sing
"he does singing," "he does that singing thing," "the action he engages in is singing," "he sings"

versus

ta ila lalu
3SG 'adjective' sing
"he's one of those singers," "the set he belongs to is the singing one," "he's a singer"

In other words, we can clarify between what he is and what he does. Furthermore, these words also give us Koa-native meta-terminology for these kinds of usages of predicates:

étema "verb"
ílama "adjective"
méama "noun"
nóama "name"

I had never thought before about the need to be able to talk about Koa in Koa, but clearly yes, we should have our own words for the concepts most relevant to Koa grammar. Now I really want words for "predicate" and "particle."

SO THEN, getting back to what we were talking about here, it turns out that we actually can potentially focus verbs using that same i ka structure:

neni i ka ka tálate i ila
vain VP DEF DEF try.instance VP 'adjective'
"vain is what the attempt was," "the attempt was in vain"

ka ka tálate i ila i neni
DEF DEF try.instance VP 'adjective' VP vain
"idem"

Do we want to, though? That's a different question. Honestly...not really. Partly because I like the brevity and flow of neni sa ka tálate over the necessarily syntactically complete versions above, partly because I dread the proliferation of /k/s that this structure would ensure, e.g. keka i ka ka lúlema i kusu? "whom did the judge ask?", partly because I honestly have some loyalty to sa as one of my very first particles. But also, allowing multiple ways of more or less saying the same things also gives us more nuance of sense in a super useful way for a living language:

kea sa se ma sano?
what FOC 2SG IMPF say
"what are you saying?"

ka se ma sano i kea?
DEF 2SG IMPF say VP what
"what you're saying is...what, exactly?"

kea i ka se ma sano?
what VP DEF 2SG IMPF say
"what is it that you're saying?"

We do still need to talk in detail about what verbal focus looks like in practice. Is "I kissed it, I didn't eat it!" suso sa ni ete ta, na suo sa? Whoa...I was expecting that to be weird, but actually I think that's exactly right. Anyway, more to come on that front. But meanwhile, I think we finally have just about everything we need to lay down some principles of focus/relativization/nominalization, hopefully the next time I find some spare time to write.

Unrelated note: tai should stop meaning "stand." I'm not sure why I decided it should have this double life, but it's kind of weird and I don't like it. It just means "be/exist."

Monday, November 1, 2021

Focus without movement

This is the first in a series of posts about focus, nominalized clauses and relativization, which in Koa are all closely related. I'm hoping that by the end of it we'll have cleared up a whole suite of muddlements that have persisted since the early days.

Koa's focus particle, sa, has its origins in Yoruba ni with the same function. In Yoruba, the focalized constituent is moved to the front of the clause, followed by ni (li or l' before an oral vowel), and leaving a gap in its original position:

kíl'o rà níbẹ̀?
what.FOC-2SG buy there
"what did you buy there?"

aṣọ ni mo rà
cloth FOC 1SG buy
"it was cloth I bought"

This is exactly parallel, at least superficially, to the structures in Koa:

kea sa se kou ne toa?
what FOC 2SG buy LOC there
"what did you buy there?"

vate sa ni kou
cloth FOC 1SG buy
"it was cloth I bought"

Movement rules like this seemed plausible enough given Yoruba's permission and I didn't think that much about it until I started trying to translate headless relative clauses. If "What do you want?" is Kea sa se halu?, then how do you say "I don't know what you want"? I recall going through a whole bunch of contortions trying to figure this out:

?ni na ilo [ kea sa se halu ]
1SG NEG know [ what FOC 2SG want ]
A word-for word calque of the English structure. Can embedded clauses can be focused just like main clauses, and without overt marking? Is this how embedded questions should work? This feels very natural, obviously, but that's not necessarily a good thing: it needs to make sense in terms of Koa, not in terms of English.

?ni na ilo ko [ kea sa se halu ]
1SG NEG know COMP [ what FOC 2SG want ]
This has a complementizer to set off the embedded clause, which is how Hungarian does it. Still feeling really nervous about the way focus works in the sub-clause, and also the way the question is embedded.

?ni na ilo ko [ se halu kea ]
1SG NEG know COMP [ 2SG want what ]
This gets rid of the worrisome focus issue, but somehow feels even worse.

I think it was nagging at me that (A) I wasn't sure I really liked my not-particularly-examined movement rules after all, and (B) accepting the IE way of thinking of these as "embedded questions" in the first place felt like sloppy, circular thinking. If there were a book titled What I Think, would the Koa translation genuinely be Kea Sa Ni Lule, using a question word -- and literally exactly the same sequence of words as the question "what do I think?" -- even though there is not really any kind of question being asked? PLUS we're explicitly not supposed to be forced to rely on intonation for basic functional distinctions, and that's exactly what this would require.

It also made me feel a little squirmy that sa was such an anomaly in every way. It's a particle that goes after the constituent it applies to? What in fact was going on here below the surface?

All this led me to remember my Nahuatl, which handles focus in a pretty astonishingly different way. Note that ca is a statement marker, contrasting with e.g. cuix which would turn these into questions:

ca cihuātl in cochi
STMT woman DEF sleep.3SG
"it is a woman who is sleeping," lit. "the she-sleeps-one is a woman"

ca ātl in niqui
STMT water DEF 1SG-drink
"it's water that I'm drinking," lit. "the I-drink-one is water"

Calquing these into Koa, we'd end up with:

mina i ka nuku
woman VP DEF sleep
"it is a woman who is sleeping"

anu i ka ni ma ipo
water VP DEF 1SG IMPF drink
"it's water that I'm drinking"

Several pretty noticeable things came out of this right away.

1) Focus requires no underlying movement rules, which is frankly awesome in a denying-Chomsky-his-invisible-branching-structures kind of way

2) Which constituent counts as the "NP" and which as the "VP" is a little arbitrary; both of these could be flipped around while retaining the focus:

ka nuku i mina
DEF sleep VP woman
"the one sleeping is a woman"

ka ni ma ipo i anu
DEF 1SG IMPF drink VP water
"the thing I'm drinking is water"

3) These structures are exactly parallel to relative clauses:

ka mina ve nuku
DEF woman REL sleep
"the woman who's sleeping"

ka anu ve ni ma ipo
DEF water REL 1SG IMPF drink
"the water I'm drinking"

4) They would give us a Koa-native way of doing "embedded questions," without having to think of them as questions at all:

ka nuku
DEF sleep
"who is sleeping"

ka ni ma ipo
DEF 1SG IMPF drink
"what I'm drinking"

Ka Ni Lule
DEF 1SG think
"What I Think"

5) Most fascinating of all, i ka in the original calqued-from-Nahuatl examples can be replaced with sa to yield identical meanings:

mina sa nuku
woman FOC sleep
"it is a woman who is sleeping"

anu sa ni ma ipo
water FOC 1SG IMPF drink
"it's water that I'm drinking"

Nahuatl made it possible to work backwards up to that Koa structure with sa in such a way that we can understand exactly what it's doing there without having to infer movement at all, AND fixed the headless relative clause problem, all in one fell swoop.

The natural follow-up question, in the face of this, is whether we actually need sa at all! And the answer is yes, for interesting reasons that we'll get to next time...

Monday, October 25, 2021

Individual incidences

Warning: this is a long one.

In Maltese, there's a systematic distinction between the abstract action of a verb and a single discrete occasion of it. From Teach Yourself Maltese by J. Aquilina (Hodder & Stoughton 1965), 149:

There are two kinds of verbal nouns. One which (i) denotes the action or state indicated by the meaning of the verb, (ii) is of masculine gender singular in number, and, (iii) like any other noun, can be preceded by the definite article, but has no plural (Exx. dfin 'burial' from difen/jidfen 'he buried/buries', id-dfin 'the burial'), and another which (i) expresses a single occurrence of action or state indicated by the verb (ii) is of feminine gender singular in number; (iii) forms its plural by suffix iet and (iv) can be preceded by the definite article (Exx. difna 'a burial'; id-difna 'the burial'; difniet or id-difniet 'burials, the burials').

More examples of these kinds of pairs:

daħk "laughter" vs daħka "a laugh"
taħwid "confusion" vs taħwida "a mess"
ġbir "gathering" vs ġabra "a collection"
żfin "dancing" vs żifna "a dance"
bligħ "swallowing" vs belgħa "a gulp"
xorb "drinking" vs xarba "a drink"
ferħ "joy" vs ferħa "a joy"

I think if it hadn't been for studying Maltese in around 2005 I might not have thought that hard about this, since the languages I know best make the distinction haphazardly (if at all): Polish śmiech "laughter, laughing, a laugh"; radość "joy, a joy"; pochowanie "burial, burying," pochówek "a burial"; picie "drinking," łyk "a drink."

In Koa, the abstract action or state is very straightforward, since there's a specific article (ko) set aside just for this: iolo "happy," ko iolo "happiness"; ipo "(to) drink," ko ipo "drinking. The question is how to get at the single occasion/occurrence/incidence/action/etc.

Well, up to this point, we've been doing something that's possibly a little weird: we've been using a double article. I don't know that I ever thought this through thoroughly in the past, but I believe what I was trying to get at was that, despite its appearance as an article, the use of ko is really more of a derivational operation. This would certainly be true in English: good -> goodness, drink -> drinking, etc. If we look at it this way, the change in meaning is something like this:

koa "a good one, good, be good"
ko koa "goodness, of goodness, be goodness"

In other words, ko changes the meaning from that of the root itself, into that of the state, condition, or action of doing or being the root. What I'm realizing, though, is that that doesn't say anything about specification or referentiality. I had been thinking that in a phrase like ko koa the ko would count as a specifier because "goodness" is a kind of universal and as such is always on the discourse stage (or, let's say, on the shelf immediately adjacent to it). But in all other cases, that kind of concept would require the particle po! If ko is derivational, we'd expect something more like this:

a kokoa "an example/occasion of goodness not yet present on the discourse stage"
ka kokoa "the example/occasion of goodness we're already aware of in this discourse"
hu kokoa "there is an example/occasion of goodness out there such that..."
po kokoa "goodness in general"

What we've been doing so far is allowing simply ko koa, rather than po kokoa, for the final example. I guess the rule we'd have to make explicit -- if that's really how it is -- would be something like "ko behaves as a specifier when used alone, and as derivational morphology when preceded by another specifier." After almost 20 years, I'm not at all sure that this makes any sense at all!

In fact, looking over our particles, ko is the only one that could be said to be derivational in nature. There are pronominals (ni se ta nu so tu), locators/adverbials/adjuncts (he la lo me mo ne no o pe), specifiers (a u hu ka ke le pi po ti to), tense/aspect markers (cu, io, ma, mi, si, su, va, vu), modals, evidentials/viridicals/miratives (ho ki ku li lu pu te vi ia), valence operators (hi mu pa), clause-level operators/conjunctions (e ha na ve), syntactic markers (i, sa, vo), and qualifiers (ce, ie, iu). I think that ko, incredibly enough, may have been mis-assigned!

What this ought to be is a suffix, almost all of which are derivational at this point (in fact I think all except for the pronouns indicating possession). Some options: -ko (just moving it to the back instead of the front), -te, -ti, -mi, -i, -pe, -vi. To be fully transparent, the one I was going to suggest at the start of all this was -te, but I'm curious to see how the others feel as well.

With -ko:
húlako "dance"
púhuko "talk"
súoko "meal"
súsoko "kiss"
élako "life"
cíniko "kindness"
lóeko "coldness"

This is pretty okay, though the diminutive suffix gets repetitive with /k/: húlakoki "a little dance," púhukoki "a little talk." Assuming ko is going to maintain the other half of its dual role as a complementizer, this also potentially risks confusion...although Polish seems to have no problem with że as complementizer and -że as an emphatic suffix (the latter not particularly common, to be fair). Ta sano ko ta no móeko "she said she had no dreams" -> Ka sánoko ko ta no móeko... "the statement that she had no dreams..." A little awkward.

With -te, -ti:
húlate, húlati "dance"
púhute, púhuti "talk"
súote, súoti "meal"
súsote, súsoti "kiss"
élate, élati "life"
cínite, cíniti "kindness"
lóete, lóeti "coldness"

These seem pretty solid, and here the diminutive works better: húlateki "a little dance," púhuteki "a little talk." Ka sánote ko ta no móete also has improved flow...though I'm sort of surprised to say I like the aesthetics of forms with -te less than those with -ko! I like how neutral these feel, though. I think I prefer -te to -ti? Or do I?

With -mi, me:
húlami, húlame "dance"
púhumi, púhume "talk"
súomi, súome "meal"
súsomi, súsome "kiss"
élami, élame "life"
cínimi, cínime "kindness"
lóemi, lóeme "coldness"

I think I could be okay with -me, though it's awfully close to -ma in a way that could actually be confusing: élame "life" vs élama "a being," for example. So probably no on this. Incidentally, I'm finding it surprisingly difficult to be okay with with the word for "kiss." Really the only one I've liked so far is súsoko, with súsoti in second place. Ana súsokoki la ni "give me a little kiss" -- ugh, -koki just is not very good. And I just realized that "height" would be kókeko, yikes. Ana súsoteki la ni? Ana súsotiki la ni? I think -te might feel the most Koa.

With -i:
húlai "dance"
púhui "talk"
súoi "meal"
súsoi "kiss"
élai "life"
cínii "kindness"
lóei "coldness"

Oof, I think this is just weird. Possible confusion with the VP marker i as well.

With -pe, vi:
húlape, húlavi "dance"
púhupe, púhuvi "talk"
súope, súovi "meal"
súsope, súsovi "kiss"
élape, élavi "life"
cínipe, cínivi "kindness"
lóepe, lóevi "coldness"

Hm. -pe doesn't feel neutral enough. I like the -vi forms but I'm not sure they should actually mean what these will mean. Ana súsoviki la ni...Ka sánove ko ta no móevi...No, I don't think so.

Okay, Olga likes -te, so I think that's what we'll call it for now. That said, I want to revisit our previous conclusion that ko's assignment had been a complete mistake. I had said that po kóate would mean the same thing as ko koa, and I'm not actually sure that's true. Let's go back over the determiners.

a X = a referential instantiation of X not yet raised to the discourse stage
ka X = a referential instantiation of X already on the discourse stage
hu X = a non-referential instantiation of X
po X = the non-referential set of all instantiations of X
ko X = X itself, uninstantiated

It looks like we need to be clear on the difference between an instantiation and an occasion/occurrence/incidence:

Instantiations: a kind person, a dog, a runner
Incidence: an act of kindness, a moment of caninity, a run

Clearly the semantics of an incidence of a strongly nominal root are a little...weird. You can imagine fantasy stories, maybe, featuring interludes of being a dog? But it's very clear and useful in roots that are more stative or verbal. Anyway, here's what the determiners would look like with the -te suffix:

a Xte = a referential incidence of X not yet raised to the discourse stage
ka Xte = a referential incidence of X already on the discourse stage
hu Xte = a non-referential incidence of X
po Xte = the non-referential set of all incidences of X
ko Xte = the concept of incidence X itself, uninstantiated

Clearly ko X and po Xte are not the same thing, even if the semantic load between them is slight to nonexistent. For example in actual usage,

po súsote i mu iolo ni "kisses make me happy"
ko suso i mu iolo ni "kissing makes me happy"

These are similar but not identical. There are different sentences that could better clarify the distinction; the first seems to be saying that the act of kissing, or fact of kissing, is what makes them happy, whereas the second refers to the kisses themselves. Here's another shot:

po súsote se i mu iolo ni "your kisses make me happy"
ko suso se i mu iolo ni "kissing you makes me happy"

Here we also see the fact that ko can introduce a clause with a clear pronominal object. I think, then, that ko in its original meaning isn't going away: we're just adding -te for a separate meaning that previously wasn't being ideally encoded. Whew! That was a lot.

On another topic, here's an interesting bit of emergent subtlety with our new suffix:

súsote "a kiss, a single instance of kissing"
pasúsote "a kiss, a single instance of being kissed"

So a súsote potentially means "a kiss X gave (someone)," and a pasúsote is "a kiss someone gave X" -- a shift of perspective from the giver to the receiver. We don't have a "massage" root yet, but if we did, would the default way of talking about one you received be the pa- form? I don't know if this should be a prescriptive distinction, but certainly a nicety of expression available to a skillful speaker.

Summing all of this up, before I finally post this behemoth and catch my breath: for those who don't speak Maltese, there's an important systematic difference to learn to make between e.g. ko cini "kindness, being kind" on the one hand, and cínite "a kindness, act of kindness" on the other. And I think élateni for "vida mía," while not quite as evocative as koélani, is still quite nice.

Monday, October 18, 2021

Big business in progress, pandemic edition

I'm sort of surprised and pleased to say there's been an awful lot going on recently, after quite a few years of...not an awful lot. There hasn't been time for exhaustive articles about everything, but I wanted to jot down the main points at the very least. (Incidentally, this post is a bit of a reference to this one from just about 11 years ago.)

1) I appear to be bringing back the phoneme /c/ after 13 years! I say "appear" because I've been mulling it over for about the past year, and it seems that I've decided on something because I've changed polo and sumo back to colo and cumo in my lexicon. My rationale for losing it back in that original post was pretty sound, but I've been drawn back to it because:

(A) I kind of need it for some additional particles that I could but would prefer not to live without
(B) There are enough possible realizations of this phoneme -- [S] and [tS] as standards, but also potentially [c], [C], even [ts] -- that I can still claim adherence to its founding IAL charter
(C) After this post I feel entitled to exercise a little creative license, and /c/ has always felt like Koa -- that is to say, Koa has felt very slightly empty without it -- and it makes me happy.

2) This one feels a little risqué, but I'm going to give it a shot: u having been freed up from its erstwhile role heading an adjectival clause, or marking a dependent clause for a minute, I've decided to try it out as a plural definite article. This means we can have an unambiguous e.g. ka sona "the duck" versus u sona "the ducks." This is the very first example of plurality we've had in Koa outside of pronouns, and in the end it may get vetoed, but I think it has the potential to be useful! It also gives us some neat compound forms: tiu "these ones," tou "those ones," keu "which ones?" pou "all of them," and so on. (Note! In case you missed it, shout out to Lapine: hoi, hoi, u embleer hrair...)


3) After several teacup storms in recent years, I've decided I do in fact want dedicated pronominal forms that can be used as predicates, as opposed to niími or similar. Using our newly minted plural article, this gives us:

nika "I"
seka "you"
taka "he/she/it"
nuu "we"
sou "all of you"
tuu "they"

Their exact use still needs to be determined, but at the very least we know we can now say things like tika i nika "this one's me."

4) So important that it gets its own number: now that we've got taka for the 3rd singular predicative pronoun, it's finally, at last, almost unbelievably, possible to definitively claim tata for "dad." Silly though it may be, this one word choice has caused me as much loss of sleep as an entire category like irrealis marking, and left me with serious rancor towards papa after feeling like it was foisted upon me nonconsensually. So now I can finally heal and move on.

5) There's been quite a bit of uncertainty about the meaning of the forms aha, aka as against hua, huka. Theoretically the corresponding members of each set both mean "something" and "someone," so what's the difference? Which should be used? It turns out that the answer is in the prefix: a denotes something real in the world not yet on the discourse stage, whereas hu refers only to theoretical existence. As such, aha means "something," yes, but specifically "something in particular." It would need to be used of a referent not yet raised to the stage, but definitely existing somewhere. Hua, on the other hand, would mean "something" in its more usual generic sense of "something unknown or unspecified." So ni halu ko sano aha "I want to say something [and I know what that is]," vs ni halu hua ala na ilo ka mea "I want something but I don't know what."

6) Similarly, we have both naha, naka and nahua, nahuka for "nothing" and "no one." This is less clear to me. The latter set is more correct in terms of formal logic, in the sense that ni na me hua = ni me nahua "I don't have anything, I have nothing." But we've never really gotten into it with negation across a clause, and natural languages are frequently anything but logical in this regard, e.g. Polish nic nigdy nie powidziałam nikomu lit. "I never didn't tell nothing to no one," in fact meaning "I never told anyone anything." I can't really see a problem with ni me naha for "I have nothing"; I don't think I'd even really go to bat enthusiastically against ni na me naha for "I don't have anything." So this one remains unsolved, but I just wanted to mention it out loud as something that will require real attention one of these days. (I've also played around with naa instead of naha. I kind of like it despite its extreme similarity to na "not." Just a thought.)

7) I've been omitting stress marking when penultimate and unambiguous. So for example natepanae "invisible" (penultimate), aika "time" (considering ai a diphthong here so still penultimate), but naíka "unacceptable" (clarifying the separation between the vowels, because potentially this could be nai-ka rather than na-ika). Stress is still written any time it's not some variation of penultimate: haná "unless," mílani "dear one."

8) It occurred to me that since alienable possessives are really bound morphemes that take the place of suffixes, they should maybe be written that way as well to avoid confusion: átoni rather than ato ni "my father." It ultimately doesn't matter enormously because the pronunciation is identical either way, so in the end it's probably an aesthetic decision. I certainly greatly prefer palóhani for "my love."

9) Verbal complements of halu "want" clearly need to be introduced by ko and I'm sort of embarrassed that I allowed them to appear without it for so long: ni halu ko lahe rather than ni halu lahe "I want to leave." It's very unclear what the latter could even mean. HOWEVER, with the return of /c/, we can make lu volitive again and assign the irrealis to cu from Lithuanian -šu! So: ni lu lahe "I want to leave," ni cu lahe "I will/would leave." This is so wonderfully practical, and delightfully clearly related to halu, I'm really pretty chuffed about it. It's also going to be useful in word formation, I think: like maybe luláevama "aspiring player."

10) "Whatever." For one dimension of this, I realized it's clearly ka vi tai, or more compactly kavitái. I think there might need to be another form for other uses, but we'll get there later.

I'm 100% positive that there are other things that I'm forgetting, but this is a pretty solid start. More coming soon!

Sunday, October 17, 2021

Making sense of interrogatives

So here's a surprisingly counterintuitive translation question: What's your name?

I had previously told Marisa Kea sa se noa? for this bit of extremely simple first-day-of-language-class material, but that's not right at all: that would mean "what's your name like?" Similarly, kea sa ta? looks like "what is he?" but really means "what's he like?" You could rephrase it as "what's his set membership?" or "what indefinite predicate can describe him?" as opposed to keka sa ta? which means "what is his identity?" or "what definite predicate is he a match with?" We're talking about identity with this name question -- matching sets 1 to 1 -- so oddly enough I think it should be Keka sa se noa?

Wait, here's a crazy thought: should a question intended to elicit a name actually be headed by kele??? That's never existed before but maybe it should: Kele sa se noa? So not "indicate to me which one out of a given set is your name," like maybe names on a list, but basically "tell me the name of your name." If that's possible, this could even just be Kele sa se?

I think that's actually exactly right, and finally begins to address some of my earliest questions from the end of this post back in 2002. What about the other specifiers? Does keko mean anything? What about kehu and kepo? I'm thinking maybe the last two don't since they're technically quantifiers rather than determiners, but I'm not sure about keko. "What...noninstantiated quality?" When would that be used? I think we'll have to come back to that one later.

Thinking more about kele, I think maybe it could elicit more than just le phrases. For example, kele sa to puu? "what's the name of that tree? what kind of tree is that?" It certainly wouldn't be kea, because kea sa to puu? would be "what is that tree like?" Keka sa to puu would be "which tree is that?" I suppose that could be answered with "pine" or "spruce"...well, maybe there's some gray area:

Kea sa to puu? = What's that tree like? What is that tree?
Keka sa to puu? = What tree is that? Which tree is that?
Kele sa to puu? = What is that tree called?

The second one could give an identity answer of "the first one on the list," "the one we were talking about," or a general answer of "spruce." The third one could give a specific answer of "Arthur," or a general category answer of "spruce." Even the first one could have an answer starting "Well, it's called a spruce..." I think the important thing isn't picking the precise right one for the application, it's the ability to use the difference between them to potentially resolve the nature of the inquiry in a more granular way.

Next up: asking about meaning, the thing that had me really confused back in 2002. It's one thing to ask what a specific tree is, but it's quite another to ask what a tree is in general: in other words, what "tree" means. As far as I'm aware, there's no prescribed way to do this in Koa at all at this point. Kea sa le puu? And/or do we need a verb of meaning, Kea sa le puu i X? Let's think about it.

Koa Day

I hereby formally announce that the birthdate of Koa has, at last, been discovered! Actually, it wasn't all that hard to find once I thought to look for it...the files containing the initial phonological thoughts from my dorm room in 1999 still had metadata with creation dates, after passing through five computers and a variety of operating systems.

And so, henceforth, the august date of September 13th shall be known as Koa Day! I'm really quite pleased; it's not like it particularly matters, I guess, but it's nice for the creative project that you might call my life's work to have a special day of its own to celebrate.

Also: Koa is 22! That's a pretty decent age for a conlang in (more or less) continuous development.

Also also: for strictest accuracy, I should give honorable mention to 1997 in which I first came up with a general phonology and concept which was definitely the precursor to Koa (and in fact koa "good" and pua "bad" date to that era). I'm not considering the birthday to belong to those days, though, because I didn't have any principles figured out other than a vague idea of "universality," and no development followed. From 9/13/1999 onwards, though, this language has been recognizably Koa, with the same bones and guiding philosophy. 

Sunday, September 26, 2021

Resolving the probability waveform of dependent clauses

This is not the post I thought it was going to be. Early last week I had a moment of epiphany in the shower in which I thought I'd solved everything in just the kind of elegant, first-principles way that I had previously announced was vain and impossible. In deference to my ecstatic past self I'll briefly explain my discovery:

First, it occurred to me that finiteness itself is a category which I should not have assumed to be meaningful in Koa, but had sort of calquingly smuggled in accidentally from the language families of my closest acquaintance. It then hung around trying to circularly justify its existence. If eliminated, there could instead be a distinction of dependent versus nondependent clauses, marked by the particles u and i respectively. This would then yield the following clausal phrase structure, at last common to all clauses:

SUBJ DEP PRON TAM VERB OTHERARGUMENTS

...with of course the refinements that if you have a nominal subject then you would omit the pronoun and vice versa, and also the dependent marker is optional and typically omitted with pronominal subjects. This gave example sentences like

ni kulu [le Óleka u loha le Iuli]
"I heard that Olga loves Julie"

le Iuli sa ka mina [le Óleka u loha]*
"Julie is the woman Olga loves"

le Óleka sa [ka mina u loha le Iuli]
"Olga is the woman who loves Julie"

It also gave me the rigorously motivated ability to optionally omit the equivalent of a complementizer or relative pronoun for dependent clauses with pronominal subjects:

ka mina (u) ni loha*
"the woman I love"

ai se ilo (u) ni loha se?
"do you know that I love you?"

This was so beautiful that I was willing to overlook the potential unintuitiveness, but alas, it was not to be. For one thing, I started to wonder why speakers really truly had to keep track of whether a clauses was dependent or not to know how to form it -- that is, why they couldn't just be modular -- in this theoretical IAL. That was a design philosophy that hadn't been articulated before but maybe should have been? But also, there were errors. In the asterisked sentences above, heads had been fronted out of their clauses, breaking the lovely pattern I had been so excited about. If we were really going to grit our teeth and do this thing, they ought to be

le Iuli sa [le Óleka u loha ka mina]
"Julie is the woman Olga loves"

(u) ni loha ka mina
"the woman I love"

That just clearly will not work. I mean, thinking about it now, I guess one could say that the shared argument could remain in situ in the matrix clause, but then how is that better than traditional relatives? What really killed it, though, was that serial verbs make the clarity of the structures very murky very fast:

ta si sano [le Malia u halu tai me se i(?) pea]
"she said Maria still wanted to be with you"

The serial verbs are halu/pea but they have different dependence marking! But if the above had u pea, wouldn't that be taking that clause down an additional level? But if it's i pea, how do you know which verb it's making a complex with? ta si sano i pea or halu i pea? I don't know the answer, and in a way that makes me feel like I shouldn't be asking the question in the first place. This is just a mess

To make matters worse, I would also lose that te tai ko... structure that for some reason had become a hill I was willing to die on. For a minute I thought that maybe ko could be an optional specifier for clauses used in nominal positions, but the battle was already lost. It was just needlessly complicated.

So what would be so bad about holding onto one potentially important realization -- that finiteness can probably be eliminated as a meaningful category in Koa, inasmuch as it's basically synonymous with verbal usage of a predicate -- while optimizing for simplicity and modularity?

Here, then, is my answer to Koa dependent clauses, hopefully the really truly final answer this time:

  • Clauses used as predicates are syntactically and morphologically identical to independent clauses
  • Clauses used as adjectives are preceded by ve when the head is not the subject of the dependent clause, optionally otherwise
  • Clauses used as nouns are preceded by either ko or ve
...and the example sentences now look like this:

ni kulu ko/ve le Óleka i loha le Iuli
"I heard that Olga loves Julie"

le Iuli sa ka mina ve le Óleka i loha
"Julie is the woman Olga loves"

le Óleka sa ka mina (ve) loha le Iuli
"Olga is the woman who loves Julie"

And borrowing one from past years,

pai ve ka mama i na ma mai koa
"a mommy-not-feeling-well day"

ti pai i ve ka mama i na ma mai koa
"this day is mommy-not-feeling-well-ish"

Maybe it's not quite as elegant as the whole business with u, but (1) as Marisa said, in mathematics elegance (i.e. concision) is the opposite of clarity, (2) this is much, much, much, much easier to learn and use than any previously conceived system, (3) this lets me use u as a plural definite article if I still want to, and (4) it saves te tai ko, surely a flag of victory.

One further related note, which I found forgotten in my dictionary but nicely articulates the difference between sivu vihe "green leaves" and sivu ve vihe "leaves that are green": "ve shifts pragmatic relevance ('emphasis') to the modifier rather than the head." I'm grateful to past Julie for leaving me those breadcrumbs back to a clear understanding of this one...