Worthy of brief mention, summer 2023 edition

In the spirit of a belated spring cleaning, I hereby present the following list of topics with which my Koa process document is beginning slightly to overflow. These seem like they probably ought to be mentioned, but have been patiently waiting because they may not merit an entire post all to themselves.

1) Words for "something" and "nothing" have been all over the place through the years. Most recently we were fretting about aha "something in particular" vs apparently hua "something in general, something unknown," but at some point late last year I realized that (A) this is needlessly complicated, and (B) aha/aka for "something/someone" didn't really make any sense because a- is not a formative anywhere else in the language. This leaves us with a much simpler hua/huka for "something/someone."

"Nothing" and "no one" have traditionally been nahua/nahuka, literally "not anything/anyone," and those forms still exist as options. Completely unique within the grammar of Koa, though, there is now another standard allomorph for "no one," naka, and two others for "nothing:" naha and naa. Naha is the preferred form where naa might create ambiguity with na "not," in practice essentially whenever it constitutes the whole NP by itself: naha i (na)cuapu "nothing will help." Naa shows up elsewhere, in particular when preceded by adjunct particles: nenaa "nowhere," henaa "never."

2) As the careful reader may have noticed from the foregoing exposition, we're still nowhere near a decision about how to construct clauses with negative pronouns. Should "I don't want anything" be nihalu naha "I want nothing," ninahalu hua "I don't want anything," or ninahalu naha "I don't want nothing?" Or are these all acceptable? I suppose I'm saying this out loud as incentive to finally get my head on straight about it sometime this year.

3) Subject pronouns are only required in complement clauses when they differ from that of the matrix clause. Thus nihalu komene "I want to go," not *nihalu konimene -- cf. nihalu kotamene "I want her to go." Similarly,

ni-si-lule ko-io-na-cu-náe-se
1SG-ANT-think NOM-STAT-NEG-IRR-see-2SG
"I thought I wasn't going to see you anymore"

...compared to

ni-si-lule ko-ta-io-na-cu-náe-se
1SG-ANT-think NOM-3SG-STAT-NEG-IRR-see-2SG
"I thought she wasn't going to see you anymore"

4) I've alluded to the fact but never said outright that "before" and "after" are verbs, not prepositions: koe "precede in time" and hala "follow in time." Thus

ka-élate ni-nánaka i koe ka-kémeni
DEF-life 1SG-grandfather FIN precede DEF-mine
"my grandfather's life preceded mine" or "my grandfather's life was before mine."

5) It appears that Koa may have an emergent future/nonfuture distinction, in contrast to the more familiar past/nonpast orientation of e.g. Old English or Finnish: bare verbs can be interpreted to have either present or past meaning, but the future -- I think -- must be marked with the irrealis cu. Thus nináese "I see you" (usually) or "I saw you," but nicunáese "I will see you"; nisúsota "I kissed her" (usually) or "I kiss her," but nicusúsota "I will kiss her." I think this is pretty cool! Now that I think about it this is also what accidentally happened in Seadi, which raises interesting questions about the structure of my brain...

6) I've struggled with presentative structures in Koa. For a very long time I used the focalizer sa to try to do this work, before finally realizing a few years ago that I was confusing different kinds of fronting. I really wanted to be able to achieve something like the Polish szła dzieweczka do laseczka, lit. "went a girl into the forest," when the whole scene is introduced and no topic has been defined yet. It was such a problem that I couldn't even translate the first sentence of Are You My Mother?, "A mother bird sat on her egg."

Boarding the plane home from Dallas once, though, I suddenly thought of a very idiomatic Welsh structure for this kind of situation -- dyma fi'n sefyll ar yr awyren, lit. "here I am sitting on the plane" -- and it occurred to me that Koa could do something parallel. Rather than just

ni-eki ne-léhukone ne-tie lai o le Tálasi
1SG-sit LOC-airplane LOC-way return ABL NAME Dallas
"I'm sitting on the plane on the way back from Dallas"

...which is semantically correct but pragmatically totally neutral, I can use the presentative particle vo "ecco, voilà, вот, jen" to do this:

vo ni-eki ne-léhukone...
PRES 1SG-sit LOC-airplane
"here I am sitting on the plane..." or "so I'm sitting here on the plane..."

I'll still need to work out the specifics of usage, but I think this might become an important pragmatic device for Koa style.

7) I've been reconsidering "7." For more than 15 years it's been sapi from Basque zazpi, but with the quantity particle pi we frequently end up with the unhappy sequence sapi pi... "7 of..." This is especially grating given my particular fondness for the number 7. Hitu from Samoan has long been an understudy, and for the moment I'm trying it out to see if it'll stick. I'm not sure I can bear reassigning sapi, though.

8) The particle io "change of state, already" can follow a predicate as an intensifier: tule io! "come ON!", ika io "all right already!" This is a little reminiscent of the Japanese particle yo, which is some sort of whimsical good luck: 美味しいよ oishii yo "this is delicious!" (The Koa particle ho is actually often closer in meaning to Japanese yo, but I'll take my wins where they come.) Similarly, ca "steady state, still" can have a kind of conciliatory force: ika ca "there there, it's okay," tule ca "come along then."

9) In the original version of Aika Konuku I had translated "so tired" as toa pi kiuni. By the time I was writing about it on the blog I'd realized this was wrong, but for the wrong reason! I thought it meant "that specific referential amount of tired," but pi governs a nominal...which means that this phrase would actually translate as "so many tired people." Oops. This is a cautionary tale to remind us that qualifiers like vaha "slightly, a little" ano "sort of," nai "somewhat," aiva "quite" and poli "very" must always follow their predicates, never precede with pi as I'd previously thought possible: kuma vaha "a little hot," not vaha pikuma "few hot people!"

10) I've translated "at least" as mocekie, literally "as the merest thing," and "et cetera" as e tei motoa, etm. for short, lit. "and onward like that." I think I'm pretty happy with "etc.," but for "at least" I've gone for a calque and fear that I haven't really taken the time to understand the semantics like I would wish. I have an intuition that it should maybe have its own morpheme, because there's this whole concessive thing going on that's way beyond the literal meaning of the underlying words in any IE language. The structure would be something like

X ko-ta-ia-holo ko-tule
X NOM-3SG-AFF-decide NOM-come
"at least he did decide to come"

or

ta-ia-holo ko-tule i X
3SG-AFF-decide NOM-come FIN X
"he did decide to come at least"

Actually I quite like that. Okay, an independent morpheme it is.

11) À propos de bottes, this sentence, clearly a critical necessity for fluency in any language:

na-vi-ana po-míti-tinu ko-cita
NEG-IMP-give GEN-bed-parasite NOM-bite
"don't let the bedbugs bite"

12) I just wanted to say out loud that this post brings me level with 2010 for the highest number of posts in a calendar year...and it's only June. I am so happy and excited that Koa has found its way to such an explosion of growth after so many years of slow simmering; as a life's work, I feel pretty proud of it.

Purpose clauses à la lettone

At some point in the past several years the allative la plus nominalization sort of unexaminedly became the standard way to form purpose clauses:

ni-lai lakoto la-ko-núkuki
1SG-return home ALL-NOM-nap
"I went back home to take a nap"

...or with a different subject in the subordinate clause,

ni-lai lakoto la-ko-ta-núkuki
1SG-return home ALL-NOM-3SG-nap
"I went back home for him to take a nap"

ni-lai lakoto la le Keoni ko-núkuki
1SG-return home ALL NAME John NOM-nap
"I went back home for John to take a nap"

I suppose this is plausible as an intuitive strategy, but I'm always suspicious of unexamined IE calques. This has been on my list to research properly for a long time. I still need to, but in the mean time I was recently reading a Latvian grammar and happened across a different structure that I thought was pretty cool. It uses essentially an imperative formation (Esperanto might call it volitive), and the purpose clause remains finite:

lai drusku atpūs-tos, mēs aizbrauk-s-im uz Jūrmalu
IMP a.little rest-SUB.REFL, we travel-FUT-1PL to Jurmala
"in order to rest a little, we shall go to Jurmala"

I wonder if the parallel Koa structure might work too, as an alternative to nominalization. Something like

ni-lai lakoto i vi-núkuki
1SG-return home FIN IMP-nap

Maybe? It's certainly nice to have options, and this new way feels a little more fluid and poetic somehow. One thing about this, though, is that it looks like a serial verb, but then the second verb seems to have different TAM marking than the first...which I think isn't typical for things called serial verbs? I'm also not sure whether we could have a different subject in the purpose clause:

?ni-lai lakoto i ta-vi-núkuki
1SG-return home FIN 3SG-IMP-nap
"I went back home for him to take a nap"

??ni-lai lakoto le Néliki i vi-núkuki
1SG-return home NAME Nellie FIN IMP-nap
"I went back home for Nellie to take a nap"

Actually I do seem to remember serial verbs sometimes having different argument structures from one verb to another, but TAM? It doesn't help a ton that my examples tend to come from pretty isolating languages without much tense marking. I need to review Describing Morphosyntax and probably Finnish, Turkish and Nahuatl while I'm at it...doesn't Finnish use some kind of translative suffix? Anyway, I'm clearly not prepared yet to offer an intelligent assessment here, but it's certainly interesting.

More about agglutination

After a lot of excited scuffling earlier this year, I confess I'm still no closer to any kind of formal typological assessment of Koa. At base, this comes down to the fact that, despite the fact that I can speak this language with ever-increasing fluency and it feels completely intuitive, I still can't articulate what the particles actually are: that is, how to classify them in any standard system of linguistic description.

If Koa is agglutinative and all these particles are best described as prefixes and suffixes, I thought, there ought to be some kind of template dictating how they combine. I spent a good amount of time diagramming all this out, for verbal forms, at least; it turns out that there is in fact a pretty firm prescriptive ordering of particles/affixes around their predicate. I made charts like this one, showing the 15 slots that verbs apparently admit:

The most complex "word" I've been able to come up with so far is kotapunacusivatesutásiluketu, "the fact that he apparently won't regularly have been able to finish rereading them," containing 12 morphemes (2 predicates and 10 particles):

ko-ta-pu-na-cu-si-va-te-su-tási-luke-tu
NOM-3SG-HEAR-NEG-IRR-ANT-HAB-ABIL-CES-repeat-read-3PL
"the fact that he apparently won't regularly have been able to finish rereading them"

Quite a bit of recursion is possible as well, which means that there's no theoretical limit on the length of a "word": for example kotaiasivamimuminúkutu "the fact that he really used to start putting them to sleep" containing two instances of the inchoative -mi- in different places.

Of course, the fact that there are ordering rules doesn't say anything about typological classification. Catalan and Bulgarian famously have very complex obligatory ordering rules for pronominal clitics, but I've never seen anyone propose that these must therefore combine with their verb into a single "word."

Perhaps these particles could be described as clitics rather than affixes, then? Unfortunately I have too little experience with complex clitic systems to have any intuitive sense, but I do notice that Koa permits pauses for thought between particles in a way that I could produce between verbs and clitic pronouns in e.g. Polish (ja się...staram "I'm...trying"), but absolutely never between verbs and affixes (*co chce-...-my? "what do...we...want?").

Can we just call them particles and be done with it? I have the frustrating sense that that word may be akin to "emphasis" in being a placeholder for actual understanding, and I'm not sure why this is turning out to be so hard for me to think through. As a person who loves to put everything in neat little labeled boxes, it drives me a little crazy...especially since the answer might affect my judgment on how Koa should ideally be written. I'll just have to soldier on as I have been for the moment.

One note: just because absurdly long strings of particles can be well-formed doesn't mean that they're necessarily desirable, clear, or constitute good style. That 12-morpheme word up there might be better expressed in more manageable chunks, something like

koputai ve nacusivatai ve tatesulúketu i tasi
NOM-HEAR-be CP NEG-IRR-ANT-HAB-be CP 3SG-ABIL-CES-read-3PL FIN repeat
"the fact that it's apparently the case that it won't regularly have been the case for him to be able to finish reading them again"

Even that's pretty ungainly. The world of Koa style has clearly only just begun to burst into bloom.

Stress-determined minimal pairs

It's been clear from the beginning that stress was going to be contrastive in Koa -- indeed, it is in fact the feature that allows predicates to be parsed reliably in a phonological, morphological and syntactic system like this -- but until the language was significantly more developed and I began to use it more regularly it hadn't quite hit home just how necessarily ubiquitous the minimal pairs would be.

I've studied many languages in which stress is phonemic, but never one in which many or most stress shifts in fact result in a well-formed word with a new, often totally unrelated meaning. I'll just dance right past the question of whether this is quite proper in an IAL -- shhhhhh -- and accept it as an interesting poetic boon. What puns and other delightful turns of phrase might be created by a skillful Koa speaker to play off of this characteristic, or what conventions might arise to minimize its effect? Here are just a few of a million possible examples of the phenomenon, marking all stressed syllables and separating morphemes for clarity.

First, stress distinguishes predicates from clusters of particles:

hána "work"
ha-ná "unless"

áina "land, earth"
ai-ná "isn't it?"

láni "sky"
la-ní "to me"

ia-pu-té "they do certainly say that that may be so!"
iápu-te "an expectoration"

Stress often serves to differentiate particle-predicate sequences from predicate-suffix structures:

nána-e "grandmother"
na-náe "doesn't see"

úso-e "sister"
u-sóe "the rivers"

líe-si "purplish"
li-ési "probably the moon"

káka-va "move one's bowels"
ka-káva "the coffee"

Lastly, stress disambiguates predicate-predicate compounds, verbs with object incorporation, and predicates with both an initial particle and a suffix:

suo-kítu "eat liver"
su-óki-tu "finish pouring them"

mai-túni = "feel calm"
ma-ítu-ni = "using me"

kuce-túpo "ride a horse"
kúce-tupo "a riding horse, a horse for riding"
ku-cétu-po "obviously a bunch of deplorables"

No doubt context would also be instrumental in parsing streams of syllables, or resolving ambiguity where stress is misplaced or insufficiently distinct; I really wonder just how much sense could be made of a paragraph of Koa in the absence of stress marking or word breaks, and whether I'm a fluent-enough speaker even to make that assessment. Might be an interesting project for a rainy afternoon someday.

Dependent clauses re-re-reenvisioned

Whenever I hear myself using the phrases "dependent clause" and "final decision" in the same sentence, it really ought to set alarm bells ringing. The last such occasion was about two years ago, in which I said the following:

• 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

Over the past several months I've been entertaining a different idea. It initially seemed like a wild flight of fancy, but I've stuck with it and it's been surprising me by feeling more and more legitimate, or maybe even unavoidable. I'm still skeptical, so don't hold me to any of this, but I want to give it a genuine chance.

In this new dependent clause universe, the rules above can still be considered correct regarding clauses with ve. Here the dependent clause is being set off by a subordinating conjunction, and as such remains finite and modular with syntax identical to its use as a main clause. I think I've realized, though, that ko isn't just in free alternation with ve for structures like these as I initially proposed. It seems obvious now -- given the fact that ko is in fact a specifier -- that its function here is that of a nominalizer.

I see the source of my confusion: with clauses with a pronominal subject, subordination with ko and ve does accidentally look the same...

ni-kulu ko-ta-koke poli
1SG-hear NOM-3SG-tall very
"I hear he's very tall"

ni-kulu ve ta-koke poli
1SG-hear CJ 3SG-tall very
"I hear he's very tall"

The apparent parallelism was more striking before I started grouping particles in writing, i.e. previously

ni kulu ko ta koke poli
ni kulu ve ta koke poli

...but however they're spelled, in speech the structures still sound identical. The wild difference appears when the clause has a nominal subject: in this situation, rather than occupying the same clause-initial position as ve, ko replaces the preverbal i that marks finite verbs. I actually identified this possibility in the post referenced above, and initially ten years earlier, but couldn't make sense yet of why this would actually be reasonable beyond an aesthetic inclination for its elegance.

There's a straight line to this new structure from a clause like this:

A. ana ko-ni-lahe
give NOM-1SG-leave
"let me go"

We might translate this literally into English as "allow my going," or "allow that I might go." Another equally valid way of phrasing this in Koa, though, would be

B. ána-ni ko-lahe
give-1SG NOM-leave
"let me go"

Here the literal translation would be more like "allow me [the act of] leaving," just like ánani kovapa "give me liberty." If we replace ni "me" in structure B above with a noun, we end up with this:

ana le Keoni ko-lahe
give NAME John NOM-leave
"let John go"

For contrast, here's the same meaning with ve and a finite clause. Notice that the finite verb marker i is restored in the position previously occupied by ko:

ana ve le Keoni i lahe
give CJ NAME John FIN leave
"let John go"

So it's clear that something pretty different is happening syntactically in subordinate clauses depending on which of these strategies we use. As a further example of how nominalization works, here's the above nikulu kotakoke poli "I hear he's very tall" with a nominal subject in the dependent clause:

ni-kulu le Keoni ko-koke poli
1SG-hear NAME John NOM-tall very
"I hear John is very tall"

For those following the plot exceptionally closely, this does have implications for the vaunted tetai ko structure we've tried so hard to preserve through all these years. Again with a nominal subject, we have two possibilities:

te-tai ve le Keoni i cu-lai he-tana
ABIL-be CJ NAME John FIN IRR-return TIME-today
"John may be coming back today"

te-tai le Keoni ko-cu-lai he-tana
ABIL-be NAME John NOM-IRR-return TIME-today
"John may be coming back today"

I find myself narrowing my eyes as I read this back to myself...I'll sit with it for a while. This is a pretty big change, so I know it make take some time to get used to. I am cheered, I will just say, by some parallels between this new structure with ko and complement clauses in Latin (not to mention English phrasings like "I know him to be trustworthy"):

audiō Ioannem longissimum esse (Latin)
hear-1SG John-ACC tall-SUPER-ACC be.INF
"I hear that John is very tall," lit. "I hear John to be very tall"

The Salishan languages have similar structures as well:

d-s-x̆aƛ' kwi s-tə̀xʷ-s tsulč (Lushootseed)
1SG.POSS-NOM-desire ART NOM-buy-3.POSS drum
"I want him to buy a drum"

...cf Koa's

ni-halu ko-ta-kou toe
1SG-want NOM-3SG-buy drum
"I want him to buy a drum"

One last example of a more complex sentence, from actual usage:

Ni-io-te-nae kemo ko-te-tai u-tie neva
1SG-TRANS-ABIL-see manner NOM-ABIL-be DEF.PL-road unstraight
"I can already see how the winding roads...

ne-múnu-nu ko-na-cu-luta a-cólute.
LOC-middle-1PL NOM-NEG-IRR-find INDEF-connection
...between us might not find a connection."

Let's see how this goes! It's a bit of a brazen move in a long history of syntactical conservatism, but I'm excited about it.

Color terms

Despite boundless enthusiasm for color as a topic in itself, I've dragged my feet on this for a long time, for reasons I'll get to in a moment. The progression of color term assignment in Koa has been interesting, reminiscent of Berlin and Kay's study: initially red and blue, then later green, then later yellow, then much later orange and purple.

It has been a very difficult decision which color terms to classify as basic, and I've been extremely cautious to move forward because of a sharp awareness that my English-based instincts were certain to influence my judgment. In the end, realizing that to some extent any choice will have arbitrary components, I decided on a base favoring symmetry on the color wheel from the standpoint of a classical RYB paint-based model. A couple hopefully justifiable additions at the end round things out. Here's the system as it currently stands.

kona "black"
liko "white"

puna "red"
kinu "orange"
mele "yellow"
vihe "green"
sini "blue"
lie "purple"

teta "brown"
lusu "gray"

I dithered on orange and purple for ages -- ten years longer than the others -- and still feel uncomfortable with them knowing just how many languages they're not basic in. Nonetheless I really can't see a way forward without them, so I'll deal with it!

For the rest, despite technically being a kind of dark orange I considered brown to be reasonable given its cross-linguistic distribution, and gray for its usefulness in describing other intermediate colors. In a way I wish that the system looked less like English, but on the other hand at least I didn't include pink, and as a language for the modern world I feel like it'll be capable of handling color theory without a lot of excesses.

Blends between primary and secondary colors are formed as compounds. Theoretically the head might be the base color, with the modifying predicate indicating a small amount of an additional color:

mélevihe "yellow-green" (a hue of green with a little yellow added)
víhemele "green-yellow" (a hue of yellow with a little green added)

In practice, though, it may be more reasonable to conceive of a single tertiary color between each primary and secondary, permitting either root ordering but preferring primary-secondary, thus

púnakinu "vermillion"
mélekinu "amber/marigold"
mélevihe "chartreuse"
sínivihe "teal/aqua"
sínilie "violet"
púnalie "magenta"

A wild impulse is urging me to create single roots for these, which would allow delicious quaternary color compounds like scarlet (red-vermillion) and indigo (blue-violet). I'll hold off for the moment (sigh) but this whole area is difficult because of how accustomed I've become to beautiful single-word descriptions of so very many colors these days. How will we express sage? Olive? Taupe? Most likely it'll be necessary to come up with more or less standardized forms based on mia "color" and a noun: mialumo "sand," maybe? And additions of nominal descriptors to the colors themselves: híkivihe "grass green."

Moving on to modifications of a starting hue, we can express saturation and tint/tone/shade as follows:

válosini "bright blue (high saturation of blue)"
kícasini "light blue (low saturation of blue, or blue mixed with white)"
pímesini "dark blue (blue mixed with black)"
lúsusini "gray blue (blue mixed with gray)"

There's also a possibility of compounds with lahu "murky, obscure, overcast" to denote, probably, combinations with brown (or with an opposing primary color, if you prefer).

Lastly, a small amount of pigmentation added to something else can be expressed with -si meaning "-ish":

púnasi "reddish"

There's clearly a lot more to come in this area, as usual no doubt to be determined (or at least necessitated) by actual usage. Hopefully this will at least be a solid starting point.

Obligation and necessity

Koa has developed quite a bit of nuance this year in its ability to express shadings of force acting on the will. Much of this started coming together just a few months ago as I suddenly became aware of just how much linguistic machinery we have at our disposal in natural languages for making fine distinctions in this area, and for veiling (or not) the context of force or control behind a communication. Unsurprisingly given the brain of its creator, Koa is rather more transparent than English in its basic structures.

Starting out with morphological strategies (if indeed Koa has inflectional morphology, on which utterly undecided question see here), we can get at an initial simple range of semantics using modal particles, with evidentials and viridicals adding subtlety:

nitelahe "I can go"
nilulahe "I want to go"

nikilahe "I have to go, I must go"

nivukilahe "I guess I should go"
nilikilahe "Seems like I should probably go"

nipukilahe "Apparently I've gotta go (based on what I hear/perceive)"

Note that ki is neutral as to the source of the necessity: nikilahe implies nothing about whether I have to go for internal or external reasons, or what those reasons might be -- see below for greater specificity here.

The particle vi, formally an imperative or optative marker, can have volitive force particularly in the 1st person. Here it's largely synonymous with the hortative ea: ea lahe "let's get going" can be regarded as semantically equivalent to nuvilahe.

nivilahe "I'd better go, I've gotta get going"

Deserving of mention at this point is the particle oe which has existed in something of an alpha version since 2003. Theoretically it might mean "should," as in "I should go, I ought to go," but though I adore that word for that meaning I've never managed to decide definitively whether it in fact really should exist and if so how it would be used. Nioelahe? Oe nilahe? Oe konilahe? Bookmark for sometime in the next decade...

Moving on to more complex structures, we can describe internal volition or need with the referent in question as the subject of a main clause:

nivoi kolahe "I can go, I'm capable of going"
nilahi kolahe "I know how to go'"
nihalu kolahe "I want to go" (equivalent to nilulahe above)
nisaa kolahe "I get to go, I'm allowed to go"
nitau kolahe "I need to go, I have a need to go (internal necessity)"

nivati kolahe "I demand/insist on going (internal requirement)"

To express external will or control, the referent becomes the subject of a nominalized subordinate clause governed by a predicate explaining the relevant semantics:

tau konilahe "I have to go (external necessity), there's a need for me to go"
pono konilahe "I should go, it's fitting/proper that I go"
halu konilahe "there's a desire for me to go (external volition)"

vati konilahe "I'm required to go (external requirement)"

noi konilahe "I've been asked to go, I have to go (external request)"

milo konilahe "I have to go (according to the rules/law)"
kase konilahe "I'm ordered to go"
pako konilahe "I'm forced/compelled to go"
i ana konilahe "I'm allowed to go, they're letting me go"

...and one with negative force:

levi konilahe "I'm not to go, I'm forbidden to go"

A few notes here:

* In this syntactic context, as is usual with predicates with presentative force, all the above forms can optionally be preceded by i -- i tau konilahe, etc. With ana it's required, as ana konilahe alone sounds like "let me go!"
* The expressions with tau and pono above are pretty common, neutral ways to translate "have to" and "should" respectively when the deontic source is external. The others are less frequent and/or have more marked or complex semantics.

* Evidentials and viridicals can of course combine with these structures as well for additional nuance: puvati konilahe "I'm required to go, so I'm informed," and so on.

These presentative forms downplay the actual agents of control: we may be talking about actual, specific people, or institutions, or just cultural forces. If we want to bring the presence of those agents further onto the stage, we can use hi- with the predicates that have transitive verbal valence (i.e. not pono, milo or levi):

hivati konilahe "'someone' is insisting that I go...(as in, we all know that 'someone' is my wife)"

Finally, just to spell this out, with a non-pronominal subject in those subordinate clauses, we'd have the usual syntax like the following:

pono ko/ve le Keoni i lahe "John should go"

...or maybe pono le Keoni kolahe? It will surprise no one that I've quietly replanted the nominalized clause briar patch in the past several months. A controversial proposal is currently in formulation for an upcoming post...