Direct-Inverse constructions in Towwu pũ saho

Towwu pũ saho has a fairly interesting syntactical system. It acts much like a direct inverse language, though the information is carried in a particle between the nouns, rather than on the verb.

To understand how this works, you first need to understand its word order. Tps is an SOV language, but there is little necessary relation between subject and agent. Rather, the subject position is ordinarily held by the topic (when the topic is the agent or patient), which in turn is generally the most definite (technically the difference is referring vs non-referring expressions but it's been a while since I've worked on this so I need to brush up on the difference again) or proximate argument. Then there's an animacy hierarchy which determines word order absent an unusual topic or differences in definiteness. The most animate argument comes first followed by less animate arguments. The hierarchy is as follows:

Animacy table from most to least animate
1st person	2nd person	3rd person	4th person	Human	Animal/ Moving Force	Inanimate (natural objects)	Inanimate (Artificial)	Abstract

After the word order is properly established, one of eight particles is chosen. This clarifies the semantic roles and the definiteness (since there are no articles) of the main arguments. A direct particle is used when the more animate (regardless of position in the sentence) argument is the agent and the inverse when the less animate argument is the agent. When the arguments have the same animacy, if the subject position is held by the agent, use the direct and use the inverse when the patient holds that position. The table below shows the role particles.

Grammatical relations in transitive sentences
“Voice”		Direct		Inverse
Agent		Referential	Non-referring	Referential	Non-referring
Patient	Referring	go	mã	i	lu
	Non-referring	e	bo	sa	nẽ

This is probably best shown with a series of examples. The following words are ebe "man", ho'o "hat", caupe "to put on, to wear", tẽmẽ "to see", ũcẽ "woman", uxxale "snake".

Ebe go ho'o caupe "The man puts on the hat". Here both arguments are definite, so the most animate goes first and a direct marker is used.

Ebe e ho'o caupe "The man puts on a hat". Still very straightforward

Ho'o mã ebe caupe "A man puts on the hat". Since the less animate argument is definite while the more animate argument is not, the less animate argument is moved to the beginning of the sentence. It still uses a direct marker though because the agent is the more animate argument. A more natural translation might be "The hat was put on by a man". If you want to make "a man" the topic (for some reason) you could say Rĩ ebe mã ho'o caupe or just Ebe mã ho'o caupe.

Ebe bo ho'o caupe "A man wears a hat". Not a very illuminating sentence, but it works. Since they have the same definiteness regular animacy rules apply.

Now for the inverses.

Ebe i uxxale tẽmẽ "The snake sees the man". Same definiteness, so the more animate argument comes first. But the agent is the less animate argument, so we use the inverse.

Ebe lu uxxale tẽmẽ "A snake sees the man". A very strange sentence that would be more likely translated "The man is seen by the snake". However, this does fall the normal rules for animacy

Uxxale sa ebe tẽmẽ "The snake sees a man". Note that while the agent is in the subject spot, you still use the inverse.

Ebe nẽ uxxale tẽmẽ "A snake sees a man". Pretty straightforward.

When the arguments are on the same level:

Ebe go ũcẽ tẽmẽ "The man sees the woman"

Ũcẽ go ebe tẽmẽ "The woman sees the man"

Ebe i ũcẽ tẽmẽ "The man is seen by the woman" or "The man, the woman sees him"

Ũcẽ i ebe tẽmẽ "The woman is seen by the man" or "The woman, the man sees her"

These are all kind of weird examples, many seeming quite unnatural. So now I'll give one example for each (not necessarily related to each other) with TAM markers and other particles to make the sentences work better.

Hã go ba ngĩ tẽmẽ "I just saw him"

Igea mã uxxale ku ngõnã "A snake ate the egg"

Ba e igea ijji ĩxũ "She might like eggs"

Uxxale bo igea ngĩ ngõnã "Snakes like eggs"

Hã i onã fu fũxã tẽmẽ? "Have you ever seen me before?"

Sei ebe lu uxxale ãxõũ ngõnã ella "(As you know, I wish) a snake would eat that man over there" This sentence has a lot going on. Sei is a distal, visible determiner. Ãxõũ marks the sentence as a desire of the speaker (even though the speaker is never mentioned in the sentence). Ella at the end of a sentence marks the entire sentence as something that should be obvious to the discourse participants.

Hau, uxxale sa be'oi uwẽ vasi ngõnã "Agreed, the snake could be a man-killer" lit. "Agreed, the snake could frequently eat people"

Ebe nẽ uxxale ijji ã ngõnã "A snake could be eating a man"

Scoped Derivation in Knǝnʔtəəʔ

Someone on reddit asked about having multiple infixes in a single word. I answered and then included some stuff on Knǝnʔtəəʔ, as copied below.

I have a conlang that works similarly. It has many infixes and they work sort of on a scope basis. Basically derivational affixes applied in order where each newly added one changes meaning based on the last one, and then if a verb, the aspectual inflection is added last. For example, take the root klbaa "to be clean". The prefix s- marks a causitive so sklbaa "to clean something". The infix <w> marks a location of a verb. kwlbaa "a clean place, a medicine man's house", skwlbaa "To turn into a clean place, to sanctify" swklbaa "a place of cleaning, a river bank". Now we have the prefix+infix combination m-ä- to derive agent nouns giving us mkälbaa "elder, a person who is clean". But there is also msäklbaa "launderer" and msäkwlbaa "one who sanctifies". So on and so forth. Point is that all the different things stack on top of each other, and that is how the order is determined.

Adding in the aspectual infixes (in this case the cessative as marked by infixation of the final vowel and consonant), we get things like kaalbaa "to stop being clean" vs saaklbaa "to stop cleaning" vs saakwlbaa "to stop sanctifying". With reflexive derivation based on some reduplication and infixation we get məmkälbaa "to be an elder", kǝkwlbaa "to be a clean place" səswklbaa "to be a river bank used for washing". Honestly, this root is a bad example since it doesn't have a final consonant. Anyway, with aspects we end up getting maamkälbaa "to stop being an elder", kaakwlbaa "to stop being a clean place", and saaswklbaa "to stop being a place for washing". Lots of stacked infixes, all based on how changes of the order matter.

Let's discuss this a little more. Knǝnʔtəəʔ is super fun since it straddles that fine line between Mandarin and Inuktitut, by which I mean it has minimal inflectional morphology but quite rich derivational morphology. This post really only went into a couple things. For example, you can have srkwlbaa "incense, an instrument used to sanctify something". Or swrkwlbaa "an incense holder, a pantry". Now the thing is, a lot of these would never be used outside of word games like this; instead compounds or other constructions would be used. But it is technically limitless, even if srswrkwlbaa "a tool used to make pantries" is pretty absurd (let alone swrswrkwlbaa "a place that holds the tools used to make pantries").

You might notice that the words are quite contextual. For example, you probably wouldn't guess that "one who is clean" means "elder". This points to the fact that while these derivations are productive, people seem to learn many of them as distinct lexical units than as derivations in and of themselves. Another example would be hwyrëëy "a paved (well stone paved) road, a place of catching frogs". Once again, the main meaning isn't obvious from the initial construction. It actually comes from the fact that roads (as built by the Kikxotians as they colonized the place) would often cut through areas that had lots of frogs. Since the roads were flat and not grassy/swampy, it became easier to catch frogs on the road than off. Of course, hwyrëëy can also mean "ambush point", since in anti-colonial conflicts, people would often attack convoys on the road. If asked why someone was hanging around a road, the excuse would be "catching frogs" to the point where hyrëëy came to mean "to ambush someone" and mhäyrëëy "rebel". And this of course led to the slur hrëëy "frog" for "Kikxotian soldier". All good clean fun.

And now for some sentences since those are fun. I'll supply the translations in another post!

Sɨ̈ mthäwäk thɛ̃ɛ̃n pcããʔ nɔk hwyrëëy löw cəclör thɛ̃ɛ̃n?
TOP AGENT<AGENT>-be.irritating 3P ride.wagon on <LOC><CAPT>frog 2S PLUR~see 3P?

Jɛt klbaa srjob kbə mã or Sɨ̈ srjob kbə mã jɛt so klbaa
NEG clean <INST>drink GEN 1S or TOP <INST>drink GEN 1S NEG 3S clean

More dialects and some phrases

Just some things that I have been thinking about the last few days, regarding TjKt mostly. First is that there is a dialect common along the coastal regions best known for the sound change [+syllabic, +short]->Ø/C_$, that is short vowels deleting in open syllables (of roots, ie etymologically). This preserves words like jāmah "faith" but not jimha "to believe in something" which instead would become jem(h) (I threw in a /ɪ/->[ɛ] as well :p). Of course, this leads to problems with words like jmohi "faithful", so I'll need to put in some more rules so that not only consonants are left. Maybe only word final deletion in that case, which would then result in a closed syllable. Another alternative would be lengthening word final short vowels if the previous vowel is also short. In this cases the options would end up being jnoh or jn(h)ī respectively. I'm kind of preferring the second option right now, it leads to some interesting stuff. I also need to figure out how to avoid clusters of intital CCC coming from CCVC roots, which leads to option 3, metathesis to CVCC. Then we'd have jom(h) as the word coming out. Yeah, not sure what to do yet. I think option 3 works the best overall. Hmm, maybe some sort of chain thing. Changes start from the right side of the word, which can change a open to a closed syllable and save the word. This can end up looking with case 1. When the final vowel is already long and the form is (V)CCVCV: then metathesis occurs to CVCCV: (option three). So the word jmohi turns to jnoh but jmuhā "thing which causes belief" becomes jmahā->jam(h)ā (/u/->[ə] in analogy with the short i sound change). Ujmahū "faithfully" becomes jamhū  because the metathesis eliminates the closedness of the first syllable.

Going down the whole 4th class (ignore the colors, html is hard), I think we get the following forms (bolded if different from standard): 

CāCaC

CCoC

ūCeCC

CeCC

CōCāC

aCCōC

CCīC

CaCCū

CūCaC

CaCCā

īCCōC

CaCCū

3rd:

CōCoC

īCCaC

CaCCī

CāCC

ūCCāC

CīCūC

āCCāC

CaCC

CīCoC

āCīCC

CCūCō

CCīoC

2nd:

āCuCC

CīCeC

CaCC

aCCōC

ūCCoC

CCaC

oCCīC

CCīC

aCCīCā

CaCC

CōCaC

CaCCī

CīCoC

1st:

CīCC

CūCC

eCCūC

CCīC

CCōC

CāCaC

CeCC

ūCeCC

CeCCī

CCaC

CīCaC

Somehow there are no duplicates within a class. Praise Kīkx!

I might throw in some mergers as well, like the alveolar affricates merging with the palatal-alveolar ones. I do think this one will preserve the pharyngeals, and I think the ejectives might weaken to pharyngealized consonants, with a loss of the non-stop ejectives. It also doesn't spirantize intervocalic stops, but does contrast consonant length intervocalically.

So let's compare some sentences now (though I haven't worked on semantic/grammatical/pragmatic stuff, so it's basically only applying sound changes at this point).

"People pray to Kikxo so that they are blessed"
Úīkmo nonsīnī Kīkxo mābíi gagaxātap-gātāp[wi:kŋɔ nɔnsi:ni: xi:kʃɔ ma:bjɪ ɣəɣəʃa:θəpga:θa:p]
Úīk nonsīnī Kīkx mābī gagaxātap-gātāp[wik nɔnsi:n:i ki:kʃ ma:bi: gəg̵əʃa:təpga:ta:p]

Pretty similar with that one

"The fishermen are eating dog in the lake"
Shbīmuzō fatiúja rōxub qal gfutī[sʼbi:mʊtʃo: ħəθɪwdzə ro:ʃʊb qʼəl għʊθi:]
Spīnzō fateúj rōxab qal gafthī[spi:ntʃo: ħətewdʒ ro:ʃəb ɢǝl gəħtˤi:]

That one is pretty similar too. Let's try two more.

"I have seen stars in the desert and heard wind on the island"
Yān khopihma kōkob qal thuyī ūmpa khoniyka citham qal úlunī[ha:n kʼɔfɪʔmə xo:xɔb qʼəl tʼʊhi: ju:mpə kʼɔni:kə tsɪtʼəm qʼəl u:lʊni:]
Yān khpehm kōkob qal tahyī ūmp khnek ztham qal úalnī[ha:n qpɛʔm̩ ko:kɔb ɢəl təʔhi: ju:mp qnɛxk tʃˤtˤəm ɢəl wəlni:]

"Sentient beings talk and eat"
Tiújī ūtiúj ūmpa tiúja[tɪwdzi: ju:θɪwdz u:mpə θɪwdzə]

Teújī ūteúj ūmp teúj[tɛwdʒi: ju:tɛwdʒ u:mp tɛwdʒ]

---

Outside of dialects, I've been thinking about sayings and such. Euphemism and the like as well. One root I was thinking about is NSP "to travel (in a group)". Some important words from this root are nōsup "caravan" and ansōp "to travel (in a group); to go from one point to another for trade". Now the transitive stem onsīp isn't really used formally, at least without an applicative. Well, it makes sense that this could be used as a causative "to make a group of people travel". While this could mean like "to send off a caravan" but more normally/colloquially it means "to exile a group" or even "to ethnically cleanse/force a migration".  It doesn't have to necessarily be malevolent. For example a gafto "flood" could force people to evacuate, such as in the sentence lbupī onaxsīp gafto "The people evacuated the village because of the flood" (lit. "As for the village, a flood forced it away")

Another interesting use of NSP is nōsup-nōsōp "to give a caravan to someone" (since these types of verbs always have recipients for direct objects). This, when taken literally, is a little strange. However, in actual use it means "to invest in someone's business venture (usually by supplying capital)" since rich merchants would earn money by giving up-and-coming merchants the right to use their goods and caravan in exchange for a cut of the profits. This later extended to a general meaning of "to invest (in someone)". It then later also gained the meaning of "to give an inheritance to someone" since those same goods later became the basis of many a merchant's son's inheritance.

This construction in general is known for having a large number of idiomatic meanings. A classic is sīqro-sīqri "to give give a butt to someone". This has come to mean "to kiss up to someone, to show deference to someone" since within Kikxotian culture, to bend over like this would be a sign of making yourself vulnerable to someone (specifically for their gain...they aren't a very progressive culture).  pōjop-pōjōp "to give death" is another example, here meaning "to execute" as opposed to the more generic pījūp "to kill". There's āruyt-ārāyt "to give a tongue" or rather "to claim a bounty (from someone), stemming from the tradition of cutting off the tongue of a person or animal to show that you killed them.

Ācutr-ācātr "to give a choice" is a very interesting one. At face value, this is a good thing. However in actual use this means "to threaten". Kikxotians value choices and agency. Therefore, in sentencing and other such arrangements, the criminal would often be given a choice in their punishment. In many private arrangements, "choices" are given as well even if everyone knows that only a certain option will be decided. Plenty of corrupt individuals and criminals would preface (such as in a tax shakedown or protection scheme) their demands with "I'm giving you a choice" until this became a euphemism for "to threaten". For some people, some back euphemism stuff has even happened where the original ācutr "choice" has come to mean "threat".

A few others ones. Wsuzī-wsūzū "to give a marsh" is to give someone something that is utterly worthless in order to mock them. It's like a white elephant gift but without the prestige. Tōwow-tōwōw "to give ice" is to do something to someone that has only temporary benefits before fading away. For example, a really terrible doctor might be accused of "only giving people ice" instead of actually healing them. Nōvos-nōvōs "to give a plow" is to endebt or enslave someone. 

Point is, this is a very productive but also highly context based construction. Many of these simply have to be learned, especially in the dialects where the first part is dropped. Like in any language, the meanings can't simply be learned as a derivation of common root, but instead as component of the culture. How else would we know that rōxub-rōxōb is "to invite someone on a day outing" or wxurā-wxūrū is "to be a quisling". Let alone that naxōíox-nōíōx is "to take someone in for the night" (this one is almost exclusively used in the passive, the active has a meaning like "to give thanks to a host".  Neither would be guessable from the root which means "grass").

Just a lot of musings

Some minor thoughts on opening, closing, and doors

So I was walking home and thinking about how mesoamerican languages use body part symbolism in word formation and compounding. Or I so I thought; I can't seem to find any references to it now. From there I was thinking how TbKt would express words for things like "door", "open", and "close". I decided that door probably wouldn't be a body part compound, most likely it would be something like "opening/what is opened". From there, I thought how the word "open" would be. I figure that some sort of thing where opening is an extension of revealing. Ends up I already have a word meaning open, so I just stuck reveal on there too. I don't have a word for "close" yet, nor do I have one for "hide" so I'm combing them into one root. Then I decided that door would probably fit better as "somethings that hides/closes things" (kind of by analogy with lid).

Some important distinctions (from English):

1. If you hide something by covering it up (from above, with another object) you use a different root YHT. I thought for a while that maybe door could be related to this root but I decided against it because it mostly has to do with things that rest over other things (hats, lids, snow, etc).
2. We might say that someone has an open mind but in this language it would be "unbounded mind" (if the ideas it is open to are "good") or a "soft/wooly mind" (if the ideas aren't). By extension the opposites are a "bound mind" and a "hard/rocky mind" respectively. A "hollow mind" could also work, though it has the implication that that person is so open-minded that they believe anything, so more like gullible. Actually, as I think about this more, I think the underlying metaphor is that the mind is a field/farm, so I'm not sure how well "hollow mind" would work. Maybe a "fallow mind"?
3. This use of door refers to things that open and shut, that is covers for door-space. This can be gates, curtains, what we actually think of as doors, and so one. A door that cannot be closed (because it is a space in a wall) is the nothinging (nonexistent) part of a wall. A "door" fills the nothinging of a wall (on that note, that whole root works really weird for english speakers, I think. A whole root for not existing).
4. I'm not sure if analogy/metonymy with doors and metaphorical ideas would work like they do in English. Probably something else would work better, depending on the metaphor. However there probably are times it would work. So I guess it depends on the figurative speech in question.

I was going to do some sentences and examples, but I don't think I will today. Just plain lazy and I ant to chase another post doing stuff on the metaphor of the mind being a farm.  Since that was a coolish sort of idea I had.  Metaphors are fun!

Harvey Danger

So I've rediscovered Harvey Danger. Even though I've enjoyed "Flagpole Sitta" for years, I've never actually bothered to listen to their other stuff, assuming they were just another generic post-grunge, late 90s alternative band.  Ends up they are, but I really like their stuff.  I haven't listened to their third album yet, but Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? and King James Version are both really good, fun, enjoyable, witty and emotional.  All my favorite things!

Moral of the story? Don't write off someone just because they are a one hit wonder.  They might have more songs that should be hits.

Some random lyrics from them:

"I swear, I wish I could be less aware... now it’s absolutely clear to me that solitude is not the same as singularity, but that’s not why I’m lonely."- This reminds me about the fun of dividing the semantic space of "loneliness".  What is loneliness? What's the difference between solitude and loneliness? How else can it be divided? Or combined? I forget how I've divided up the space in various conlangs, if I have at all, but I know I made loneliness taboo for the Úīkmo Kīkxot. Well not loneliness perse, but bachelorhood and loneliness outside of set times. In fact one of their core religious tales is about how loneliness can drive someone to do evil things. It has two roots so far relating to loneliness, both with negative connotations (well sort of at least). One root is for humans, one is for other stuff. I dunno if this technically counts as suppletion, but TbKt has a pretty strong system of roots used only for humans and a separate root meaning the same thing for everything else. An essential part of insults is using the wrong verb form to imply that someone is less than human.

I think that the mountain tribes (one day I'll give them a name!) might distinguish loneliness from solitude by using the adversative particle.  But I dunno yet. Osogkum may use the volitional form to distinguish the two.  Again, I dunno, haven't hit that hill yet.

Speaking of alone, I just looked up it's etymology and it apparently came from "all one". Who would've guessed :p

"Friends will turn against you

People disappoint you every time
So if you've got greatness in you would you do us all a favor
And keep it to yourself?"

" Cast off the ego scars and let's go hit the bars
I reserve the right to hold my grudges
Friends like you, you know the rest
But all told, I hold on to my anger far too long"

"Some people will surprise you with a real depth of feeling
Others still may shock you with all that they're revealing
But one thing's sure: there's always more information than you ask
For."

"You can bash your head against a wall forever,
The wall will never change.
But if you start to like the bloody bruises,
The wall cannot be blamed."

And of course the classic:

"I'm not sick but I'm not well
And I'm so hot cause I'm in hell"

Among other lyrics and songs.

I like late 90s punk/post-punk/post-hardcore/emo/alternative/etc. Pinkerton is probably my favorite Weezer album, after all. In fact I was very happy to hear that At the Drive In is realizing a new album in a couple months. One of my favorite modern bands is Two Inch Astronaut. If you are somehow reading this blog and yet haven't had me try to get you to listen to them, you should go listen to them. And check out Exploding in Sound Records. I've been following this label since 2013 and they're starting to get bigger. Some of their bands even have wikipedia pages now! Though it makes me feel sort of band that I didn't grad early Speedy Oritz stuff before they got (relatively) big.

I like to ramble.  It makes me feel like there's thoughts in my brain.

What is love? A Valentine's Day special

Yeah I'm a couple days late. Actually I didn't even start this post until after Valentine's Day. Didn't even have the idea until afterwards. But it's what I would have done had I not been swamped up in homework.

Anyway, in honor of that special day I detest so much, let's look at words for love in various conlangs I've made. I'll basically only deal with Toúījāb Kīkxot because I think that's the one I have the most info on this for, so maybs not various conlangs. It's not a topic I spend much time on, yannow?

The basic root for love is XYS (I) which is all things relating to the liver (think Indonesian hati, if you happen to know Indonesia). Of course in actual use it rarely is used to refer to the actual liver (xīyso) and generally means "the place where emotions are". While this could mean any emotions, the úīkmo Kīkxot use it almost exclusively to refer to love. If the heart is the base noun, love itself is xoyīs, though in informal and everyday speech many people will simply use xīyso (or given that the standard is different from most varieties, probably something like xīso or sisu or something else like that). This love is more or less equivalent to the English word "love", covering a wide semantic space. In Indonesian terms, xoyīs is kasih, cinta, and sayang all wrapped in one word, which is a bit unusual since this language usually cleaves with Indonesia pretty well, being based of it after all.

TbKt (I need to think of good abbreviations) is a language that loves compounding and this is no different when it comes to love. Xīysoāb Kīkxot (lit. "God's heart") is "charity" or the Greek "agape". It's the love that God (well, not our understanding of God, but I'll use the translation regardless) feels towards his worshipers. More metaphorically it represents an unconditional (strangely enough, considering that Kīkxo's love may seem pretty conditional to a westerner) love, a care and affection so deep that it can't be gotten rid of no matter how awful someone is. It's not pity though (that's kāral), it's a deeper understanding felt towards someone, yannow? Familial love is usually represented in two ways: with a liver+owner compound (ex: xīysoāb mīznot- "motherly love") or with a nominialzation of the roots transitive verb (ex: micna "motherly love). Usage really depends on context and user preference, the first being more likely to be used in a sentence like "Motherly love is so important" while the second in a sentence like "Motherly love makes my children happy."

Verbwise, XYS can be used in the transitive or intransitive and always has a human agent (though some particularly bigoted úīkmo kīkxot would consider it improper to use with a vīggo (tribesman) agent). Intransitive ūxiys has a general meaning of "to have strong emotions/love" and is usually used with a preposition to mark the recipient. This can be used with non-human/inanimate recipients, especially in informal registers, though the more inanimate the recipient the stranger it sounds. Without any compliment, it usually carries a meaning like "in love", "unstable", "crazy (indonesian "gila" or "tergila")" or "overcome by emotions". The transitive verb form xiysa can only be used with a human patient/recipient. It almost always takes the benefactive suffix -ī (the bare stem has a causitive meaning, which is a whole nother can of worms but would have a meaning like "X makes Y fall in love" or more naturally "Y fell in love with X", but it isn't a common construction). Like many verbs of emotion, the habitual form "C(a)-" is used, so xaxiysaī is the most common way of saying "X loves Y". Being a fairly intimate verb, "I love you" would be Yān xaxiysaī ōdan (or xaxiysaīōd) in most cases.

While xoyīs describes a variety of different sorts of love, the verb forms pretty much exclusively refer to romantic and sexual love. This is especially clear with the intensified form, which basically translate to "lust". To say that you love someone in a non-romantic sense, the transitive form of the family roots are generally. Now there is some ambiguity, as these verbs could mean "to consider [patient] a Y (with the implicit "love [patient] like a Y" built into this)" (a semi-causative in nature) or "to care for [patient] in a Yly role". It most cases, agent focus is the second translation while patient focus is the first translation, but as always context rules.  As examples, Yān dichha ōdan would probably translate to something like "I care for you like a sibling" (or more likely "I'm babysitting you/I admire you" depending on the relative ages of the speakers) while Ōdan dadaxichha yān  would be "I love you (like a sibling)" (lit. "You are considered a sibling by me"). Just like other verbs of emotion, these often are in the habitual aspect, but unlike XYS, do not take the benefactive. Unlike the familial love verbs kikxa is always treated like a causative. Humans are considered unable to love someone like God loves someone, so it would be absurd for the verb to ever mean "to love someone like God loves people". Kikxa means "to consider someone God" or more regularly (and less blasphemously) "to adore someone". It is usually in patient-focus, because why would God(-like beings) not be the focus of the sentence. Therefore Ōdan kakaxikxa yān would mean "I adore you" or "I love you fully (and unconditionally)" or even "I love you in the most platonic and totally non-romantic way" (Also, kakaxikxa is quite the mouthful considering it has only two consonant phonemes). These constructions are fairly informal (and highly intimate, though as seen previously not necessarily romantic (though it usually is despite coming from the root for God)) in nature and form a nice contrast with the intensified xiysa-xiysaī, "to lust after someone".

The normal word for "boyfriend/girlfriend/lover" is xāyas and this word is rarely used to describe one's spouse. Instead one's spouse is usually referred to as a ōmazhnzō/ōmazhnzun, which literally means "reflection". Increasingly, this is used by unmarried lovers to describe that person they just /know/ is the one, and it is also highly common for any description of a "lover" in literature and poetry. Xāyas can also mean "loving" as an adjective, and in this case is used with spouses. Which can lead to sentences like Ōmazhnzō xāyas mōnak nazinitra-nitra omazhnzunmā "A loving husband shouldn't beat his wife", though a wife saying this to her husband might use fis or even mavox instead of -mā, depending on the circumstances. One final bit of (naughtier fun). A vulgar slang word! Sasās means "horny", coming from a dialect that indicates intensity with a back reduplication (xāyas-xāyas -> saxāyas), and has sound rules that go something like this: x->s and deletion of y between the same vowel āya->ā. So saxāyas->sasāyas->sasāas->sasās. Pretty cool, huh?

I think that is enough for the valentine's special. Really makes me think about how little my conlangs care about this topic. Also, be glad that I didn't go all anthropological and talk about the complex courtship and marriage customs of the úīkmo kīkxot. Let alone their opinions on PDA.

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.