Re: Korahamla lives!

En réponse à Amanda Babcock <langs@...>:

>
> Traditional interlinears will not work on Korahámla.  It's a mystery
> how the native speakers are able to manage the language, what with the
> derivational processes being so impenetrable.  The utterance
> disassembled,
> with the easy part first:
>
>         ków "self"
>           plus -ki- "my"        gives kókiw "myself, I"
"my" as an infix? Nice! Funny enough, Possessives in Maggel are prefixes, but
with nouns derived from a specific kind of verbs (called "strong verbs"), they
become infixes too ;)))) .

>           plus topic marker i-  gives ikókiw
>
> i- is the topic marker for new information, as if I were saying out of
> the blue "you know, I love my cat".  If I'd been making other
> I-statements,
> I would use u- here (topic marker for old information).
>
Vocabulary remark: "topic" typically refers only to new information. What you
call "topic ... for old information" should rather be called "focus". Note that
not everybody agrees on that nomenclature, but I find it rather simple and
helpful.

> Next, the comment:
>
>         méro "cat"
>           plus diminutive -l-   gives meléro "kitty"
Checking on your site, I discovered that the first 'e' is merely a repetition
of the following vowel. The idea is nice and backed up by some languages.

>           plus -ki- "my"        gives melékiro "my kitty"
>           plus -a- "to love"    gives melalékiro "to love my kitty"
And this time it's the consonant which gets doubled. Nifty! :)) Are all verbs
infixes? In this case, I guess there is only a limited amount of verbal
infixes, and to make other verbs you create different expressions with
different nouns and different verb infixes (a la Japanese "denwa": phone
+ "suru": do -> "denwasuru": to phone).

>           plus -j- "agent of"   gives melaléjkiro "one who loves my
> kitty"
How is this one pronounced? [j], [Z]?

>           plus comment marker jo-       gives jomelaléjkiro
>
> Multiple comments can be strung together.  The first, which is
> coreferential
> with the topic, takes the jo- prefix.  Subsequent comments take we- if
> they
> have the same reference as the previous comment, and su- if they have
> a
> different reference from the previous comment.
>
If they don't have the same reference as the previous comment, how do you know
which topic it refers to then? Or do you allow topics (or rather focuses,
topics can't be dropped since they refer to new info) to be unstated, which
would make the language pro-drop?

> Now if only I could think of a way to make the cat be the topic...
You could introduce a passive, which would transform the verbal infix "love"
into "be loved", and add the result to "myself" put in comment. That's after
all one of the main use of the passive voice. Of course, since your passive
wouldn't make the subject unnecessary, it wouldn't be a real voice... You can
call it "inverse" instead if you want ;))) .

>         imelékiro jomaméwro
>
> which comes out to "my kitty is the recipient of loving-a-cat".
>
>         jokakówewþe:
>           ków "self"
>           plus -þe "her"        gives kówþe "herself, she"
>           plus -a- "to love"    gives kakówþe "to love her"
>           plus patient marker -w-       gives kakówewþe "she who is
> loved"
>           plus comment marker jo-       gives jokakówewþe
>
>         jomaméwro:
>           méro "cat"
>           plus -a- "to love"    gives maméro "to love a cat"
>           plus patient marker -w-       gives maméwro "beloved cat"
>           plus comment marker jo-       gives jomaméwro
>
> And I think that's enough for tonight.
>
Extremely interesting. My Moten uses a lot of infixes too (together with
prefixes and suffixes), and since it features overdeclination (the possibility
to add a case marker - usually a combination infix+suffix - to an already
declined noun, or even a conjugated verb) and various sound changes due to the
addition of those affixes, words can at times be extremely difficult to parse.
But you go even further than me in that respect ;))) . I like it!

> (Korahámla v.2, which this is, can be played with at
> http://mercury.quandary.org/~langs/cgi-bin/compose.v2.cgi .  Currently
> there is not yet a way to get the topic and comment on the same page;
> they must be constructed separately.)
>
It's nice anyway. Keep up the good work!

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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