Modal derivation

The past year seems to have been devoted to Slavic philology -- Macedonian in particular, and obsessively -- rather than Koa, but in honor of Koa Day I wanted to write a quick post on a topic that's been waiting in the queue for at least a few years. The bones of these particular extremely common derivational structures have been in active use since around 2011, so let's formalize them.

Among Koa's modal particles are these three:

te "able to"
ki "must, need to"
lu "want to"

These most often show up alongside verbal predicates, e.g.

ai se-te-náe-ni?
QU 2SG-ABIL-see-1SG
"can you see me?"

When used with adjectival predicates, though, they derive an interesting range of meaning which lacks systematic representation in English:

miko te-koma
friend ABIL-understand
"an understanding friend, a friend who's able to understand"

te-lehu
ABIL-fly
"able to fly, airworthy"

ki-nuku
DEB-sleep
"sleepy"

lu-láeva
DES-play.music
"an aspiring player"

In combination with the passive particle pa, the abilitative really comes into its own, pretty closely translating the English -able/-ible suffix:

te-pa-nae
ABIL-PASS-see
"visible = able to be seen"

na-te-pa-nae
NEG-ABIL-PASS-see
"invisible = not able to be seen"

te-pa-koma
ABIL-PASS-understand
"intelligible"

na-te-pa-ilo
NEG-ABIL-PASS-know
"ineffable"

With ki-, we can create forms like

ki-pa-ete
DEB-PASS-do
"agenda = (things which) must be done"

na-vi-uni u sihi ki-pa-suo
NEG-IMP-forget DEF.PL vegetable DEB-PASS-eat
"don't forget the vegetables that need to be eaten"

ki-pa-tuho sa le Kátako
DEB-PASS-destroy FOC NAME Carthage
"Carthago delenda est"

It occurred to me in whatever year it was that I first wrote up the notes for this post that in tepa- and kipa- we've captured the semantics of Esperanto -ebl- and -end-, respectively. What about E-o -ind-, though: "worthy of being Xed"?

I'm still not sure about this, but for the moment I'm trying out a bit of a semantic extension of the particle lu in this context, with the idea that it's a pretty short jump from an object "wanting" to have something done to it, to that object deserving having that something done to it. For example:

kava lu-pa-ipo
coffee DES-PASS-drink
"coffee worth drinking, coffee that wants to be drunk"

lu-pa-niko
DES-PASS-marvel
"amazing = wanting to be marveled at"

A bit whimsical at best, or facile at worst, but I feel like it might be worth it to get at a semantic which otherwise would require a bunch of analytical circumlocution -- especially when the literal value of that sequence of particles wouldn't otherwise be particularly useful in any contexts where the head lacks consciousness. On the other hand, there are sentences like this that turn out to be worryingly ambiguous:

ni-lu-pa-loha
1SG-DES-PASS-love
"I'm worthy of love" OR "I want to be loved"

As with so many concepts in Koa, I'll have to sit with this one and potentially see how it works out in actual usage. It also matters that the desiderative/volitive/conative lu and the verb halu "want" are actually not synonymous, which should probably be explored in another future post! Thus

ni-halu ko loha
1SG-want ABS love
"I want to love"

ni-lu-loha
1SG-DES-love
"I'm in the mood for love, I feel like loving, I intend to love"

For now, happy 25th, Koa! Clearly lots more still to come.