Exploring the possible scope of quoting

I need to look up a bunch of Bislama examples to do this properly, but basically, the idea is that le could expand its usefulness beyond just marking proper names. I think we can generalize to say that it could be used to mark anything that’s being mentioned rather than used. So maybe

kea sa le iuna?
"what's a train?"

But more than that, it could potentially also be used as an alternate strategy to mark clauses that are currently just being nominalized. So

ta sano le ni loha le Keoni
"she said that she loves John"
literally "she said, 'I love John'"

Apparently the above is (amazingly) the normal strategy for this kind of sentence in Quechua. Now I’m getting confused, though, because I was starting to think of it like Bislama se, in which case the sentence above should appear as

ta sano le ta loha le Keoni
i.e. hem i talem se hem i lavem John
“She said that she loves John”

More work is needed here. Probably for this usage, either ko or ve ought to be adequate, since the meaning would be identical [and the difference between ko and ve in this usage is...what?]. If we really are mentioning rather than using, I suspect direct quotation is the use we most need.

One final thought: trying to translate “mean,” as in “what does that mean?” Which of these is correct?

1. Kea sa le toa?
2. Le kea sa toa?

Ugh...I’m having trouble mustering an argument either way. Let’s think about it.

Nominalized possessive phrases

We can say ka pasúo ka kunu "the dog's food," so logically ka ka kunu must be"the dog's one, the dog's," etc. It's kind of weird because essentially ka ka ends up being a compound particle introducing definite possessives, but you can't argue with the sense of it.

Ka ni i iso i taha ka se "mine is bigger than yours." I suppose there could be some minimal word requirements that would give us ka nii, ka sei, etc...maybe. But anyway you get the point.

Note from 2016 as I'm posting this thing I just unearthed: just because ka ka kunu is logical and has to be admissible, that doesn't mean it's the best way to express this in Koa or that there couldn't be other ways. Using asi as a potential candidate, we could do something like ka asi ka kunu "the dog's (one/thing)," ka asi ni i iso i taha ka asi se "my one/thing is bigger than your one/thing" if needed. Actually I don't dislike my original renderings of these at all, but I can see how the embedding could continue ad absurdum and I just wanted to insert some sanity...

Verbal focus with arguments

Okay, check this out: when the verb is the focus, we've had an insoluble issue with how to manage other sentence arguments. For example:

ni ma suo ka sumo
1SG IMPF eat DEF squash
"I'm eating the squash"

becomes, when the verb is in focus, what exactly?

suo sa ni pe ka sumo...ma?
eat FOC 1SG REL DEF squash IMPF
"I'm eating the squash" (stranded particle)

ma suo sa ni pe ka sumo?
IMPF eat FOC 1SG REL DEF squash
"I'm eating the squash" (just how much of the VP do I have to front?)

In this case pe becomes effectively a kind of accusative marker (literally "with respect to") for some pretty strange, not-very-Koa-like syntax. Yuck. But, so I just read, Basque (similarly sensitive to topic/focus) accomplishes this by focusing an unconjugated verb, then using a dummy verb in the usual spot with the usual inflection. Here's how that could look in Koa, with ete, possibly set to replace teke for "do":

suo sa ni ma ete
eat FOC 1SG IMPF do
"I'm eating," i.e. "it's eating that I'm doing"

Done: easy, elegant, totally normal-looking Koa. Note: this would logically require that ete suo be an acceptable usage. Maybe some kind of blanching or euphemistic force when not focusing?

Next up: how to handle topic. We've never figured this out.

Kinship terms are still sort of unexamined

Kinship terms need work. For one thing I'm thinking "grandma" and "grandpa" should have separate words, and maybe even "aunt" and "uncle" when I think more about it, but the point is: what is the underlying theory here? We do not want Esperanto. There should be some real human logic to the choices.

Beyond the "basic" terms, whatever those are, we need a system for generating the remaining terms for more distant relations. Like, affixes used only in kinship terms. We want to be able to specify...well, actually I'm not even exactly sure what would be relevant because I'm not very knowledgeable about genealogy. But I could certainly find out.

Still working on the ordinals

Idea for ordinal numbers: what about ka? So like, he pai ka sapi ta uni "on the seventh day he rested." That way there isn't the ambiguity with pai sapi between "seven days" and "seventh day," and we don't have to be stuck with the ungainly sapi pi pai all the time.

Koa inspiration from Amharic

First of all, just out of interest, Amharic demonstrative pronouns/adjectives are the same as the possessives for that level of deixis. For example, "that book" has the same form as "his book." I mention this because there was a brief discussion with Allison about using a strategy like this in Koa in the early 2000's.

The main point of this entry, though, is about reduplication. We've talked about the talo-talo and talo-alo types (not that we know exactly what they do), but Amharic has a different method that we could use too: repeating the medial consonant with the vowel a. Thus talo > találo, kunu > kunánu, etc. CVV nouns often end up with a pronounced glottal stop: pai > pa'ái.

I was thinking this might serve to make the noun more euphemistic, more gentle, less objectionable, or something. So a pragmatic rather than semantic value. Just one possible idea, though.

So like... Ai se halu luái? "Do you want to get it on?" You're not exactly saying lui, but still talking about it.

Directional markers

As the baby will be here at any moment, I figure I'd better take some time to document anything still floating around in my brain. Today's topic is directional markers, as inspired by Nahuatl usage. I'm not positive I'm going to go forward with this, but I'll throw it out there.

I've been realizing over the last month that many other particles beyond na, ia, ai and the pronouns could reasonably appear independently: te, li, pu and the like as other ways of responding to questions, for example. Why not locative particles -- ne, la, o -- as well?

In this context, they would presumably modify the semantics of the verb phrase to indicate the directionality of the action. I'm thinking of contexts like these for ne, for instance, suggesting durative presence in a state or activity:

ota ne!
wait LOC
"wait/stay there!"

ta ma asu ne
3SG IMP dwell LOC
"she was living there"

ni tai ne, ni pea ne
1SG be LOC, 1SG stay LOC
"j'y suis, j'y reste"

With la and o, the meaning would theoretically indicate motion towards or away from a given deictic center, thus something like

ta mene la he leo
3SG go ALL TIME today
"he's going there today" (somewhere we're talking about)

ta lahe o he amu
3SG leave ABL TIME morning
"he left there in the morning" (some place we're talking about)

In addition to this, though, the Nahuatl usage I mentioned above extends this metaphorically: la becomes tied to the known, safe, self, group, land, etc., where o indicates other, unknown, unsafe. For example, in addition to ta pahu "she fell," we could have the following two translations with additional meaning:

ta pahu la
3SG fall ALL
"she fell [to safety]"

ta pahu o
3SG fall ABL
"she fell [into the water/fire/canyon etc.]

In the same way, tu ma moho kivi i pea "they kept throwing stones" could be given some additional context:

tu ma moho kivi la i pea
3PL IMP throw stone ALL FIN continue
"they [other people/the enemy] kept throwing stones [at us]"

tu ma moho kivi o i pea
3PL IMP throw stone ABL FIN continue
"they [our people] kept throwing stones [at them]"

Or with even simpler concepts,

tule la
come ALL
"come here"

mene/lahe o
go/leave ABL
"go away"

Maybe things like

ta ipo ka sahi o
3SG drink DEF wine ABL
"he drank the wine all up" [with negative connotation]

sano ta o
say 3SG ABL
"just go ahead and say it"

sano ta la
say 3SG ALL
"come on, just tell me"

Anyway, you get the idea. It seems like a pretty useful thing to be able to do, as long as it doesn't cause any problems; I'll keep thinking about that. Next up: what adjectival structures, and therefore also object incorporation, actually mean...