Murder: The semantics of killing people

Last night I got in a debate about ethics. But one interesting thing that our debate briefly looked at the word murder (context: At one point, I was arguing that when you use the word murder in debate of course murder is evil, because our language encodes said value judgement in the word itself, he was saying that murder is evil, but because killing is evil).  I don't quite remember how to do these semantic things but the word murder in english looks something like this:

Murder

=death

[+caused]

[+intentional]
[+bad]

Or in other words, murder is a form of death which was caused by another person, intentionally, and is bad. If we negate the intentional, it becomes a different word in english, manslaughter. Remove the bad and it becomes something like justified killing or self-defense or just plain killing. If it isn't caused by another person/thing, it isn't a cut into the field of killing itself, just part of the larger space of dying. In english, we represent a lot of these different semantic divisions lexically, but after the debate I started thinking, how do I do this in my own languages. Which ones make semantic divisions we don't? Are said division more morphological/derivational in nature or lexical? So let's take a look at what I have so far and what visions I have for said languages, and go from there!

Ǩüttǩarrą Roś:

So there's actually two drafts of this language and in the first draft (must be from like 6 or 8 years ago, wow), I actually have a discussion of this issue. I haven't reapplied it to the second draft yet (though I probably will), but clearly how I wanted to divided the roots was animate vs inanimate, with english translations sort of like this:

category	human	non human
end a life	kill	kill
kill for the sake of resource harvesting	manhunt	hunt
no reason	murder	slaughter
self-defense or honor	avenge	slay

That was more difficult than it should be and now the html is even more or a mess. Anyway, my point is that the primary division here between "humans" and "non-humans". Volition isn't really considered, though intent is. It reflects a cultural idea that using something is better than not using something and that the ends justify the means.

In the current draft, I have one root so far related to this: pëntov "to die". Presumably this lines up with with the human form of death. Pënsočov is "to kill" lit "to cause to die". I'm guessing this is the neutral "kill". As for the others, there currently is no way to express intent, but conidering this is meant to be a constructed language, it falls within reason that the constructor would create roots for each row. By analogy the base root would mean "to die", and then a causative lets it fill space on this table. This leaves me with up to seven more roots to create, as I want to maintain the human/non-human split.

Osogkum:

This language does not have any roots at all yet relating to death or killing. So I'll look at the more theoretical approach of how I'd derive words from a hypothetical root. Osogkum has two grammatical functions that are relevant to this discussion, I feel: a volitive mood and a causative voice. The volative mood in this case marks a verb as explicitly intentional, or it could mean that the subject wants to do the verb (yay ambiguity, though I think that a desire is more likely in certain aspects/voices and volition in others, like the perfective. But ambiguity sill remains). The causative voice raises the valency of the verb marking the new subject as causing the old subject (now marked as the indirect object) to do the verb to the object. But I think that this is almost entirely for constructions like "He made her read the book" in Osogkum. So I feel that the split between death and killing would be separate roots (and using the causative would mark the separation between the subject and the cause of the object's death, as opposed to the use "to kill"). Then volition (either desire or intentionality) can be expressed, so the difference between murder and manslaughter would be morphological in nature. I think that's how this will work in this language.

The Tundra Afrit language:

Barely has a phonology and smatterings of morphology. I don't even have a name for it yet.  So we'll skip it for now

Toúījāb Kīkxot:

So so far I have one root relating to death PJP. As often works, the change in transitivity makes this a causative so āpjāp "to die" becomes pījūp "to kill". Judging from their culture and the general feel of the language, I think that most differentiation in volition and value judgements will come from modifiers, compounds and reduplication (I think I already have the intensitive translated as "murder" and pījūp-pujip should translate to "manslaughter") or even syntax. That being said, I do feel a specific root meaning "to die a martyr/to martyr someone" is probably in order, as that seems like the sort of thing this language would have. And it probably would fall in class 1 (human) instead of class 3 (inanimate).

Nounwise, it is very easy to express the difference between dying and killing, and compounding should work to cut up the semantic space.

The sea people's language:

I really need to derive a name for this. Anyway, I have a root, gepom, which means things relating to dying. Because of the way this language works gepok would have some meaning like "dead", gepor would mean "to die", and the conjugated for would mean "to kill". As far as volition and the like goes, I feel like would have a lot to do with the choice of verb form, noun case and syntax. I think that manslaughter would probably be represented in a sort of sentence like "Dies X[absolutive], Kills Y[nominative] X[absolutive]", while murder would be simple "Kills Y[nominative] X[absolutive]" Active-stative languages are weird. An intentional death would most likely have X in the nominative, after all. I really don't know man. That's part of why I started other projects and keep hopping between languages while skipping this. I'll get back to it one day. The nouns, staying a very seperate class from verbs would probably cover the concepts separately and use loans as needed to further differentiate them. I can totally see the Sea People's borrowing the Kikxot word pajpo (lit. killing) to mean "murder" in our sense.

The mountain people's language.

Also needs a name. It has separate words for "to die" mẽwĩẽ and "to kill" ẽmẽtõ. There is a grammatical causative, but I doubt it applies in this case. I think it has more to do with adjectives or other things. I dunno. At the very least the ideas are lexically different here. The differences in volition are really easily expressed in this languages using verbal particles, but for the nouns (I just now realized that I've been ignoring nouns, which is a big part in the semantic differences of english death verbs. Oh well, I'll try to add a bit) it is probably a bit trickier. Verbs and nouns convert a lot, then a construction using pũ (I swear the language isn't entirely nasal!) could make such distinctions. So for example ẽmẽtõ would mean "killing" but ẽmẽtõ pũ "desire" (lit. killing's desire) would mean "murder" and ẽmẽtõ pũ "accident" (lit. killing's accident) would mean "manslaughter". Of course, in actual spoken language, people might just try to make the verb the core of the sentence instead of a noun.

And that's my first actual language post.  What a big step! Most probably won't be this involved, but hey, semantics is fun.