Comments on love


Posted by Philip Newton on 12:07 7/12/01

In reply to: I love you too posted by Mark Rosenfelder on 16:18 7/11/01

Say, you're good at this.

Thanks :-)

In Barakhinei you need an ending phatic particle (especially in such an emotive sentence), probably ma for male speakers, zêl for females.

Ah, I hadn't seen the bit on phatic particles. Yes, that sounds right.

Kebreni: The benefactive would be the best choice, but I'm not happy with the verb choice.

Well, I was trying to make do with what I saw :-).

Wede:i: Using 'heart' is clever, but I'm wondering if that's the right organ; not all cultures see emotions as living in the heart. I think I'll go with zurtau 'desire' instead, itself a derivative meaning 'want to have'. So: Zuringtaku.

According to http://www.zompist.com/wedei.html, the first u is long: zu:ru --> zu:rtau. So zu:ringtaku?

is a good guess for Lufasha

It's straight from the page on Proto-Eastern Philology; under the heading Morphological classes, the example showing the format for comparisons relates proto-Eastern *lu:bek to Cuêzi lu:ve, Cadhinor liubec, Axunashin ruwik, Obenzayet lüvag, and Lufasha . Just a bit further down in "examples of verbs", lu:bek is again used and linked to Lufasha .

I derived lúbo: by the sound-change rules from proto-Eastern to Lufasha. However, they're specifically marked as "sketch only; very inaccurate", so it's not surprising that proto-Eastern lu:bawo should not turn into lúbo: -- especially since the infinitive is already only one syllable long, . (In case you're interested, the rules I used to derive the form were: lu:bawo | aw --> o: | lu:bo:o | V: --> [12]/[+voice]_ | lúbo:o | V --> Ø/_# | lúbo:.)

I went back to the word paru 'lip', and derived parsu 'kiss' (the infix -s- derives a verb expressing the usual action associated with a noun; cf. poc 'foot' --> pocsu 'kick'). That gives us the adjectivization pansyr 'dear, loveable'

I see. This is the derivation "The infix -n- + final -(y)r gives an adjective meaning 'having the quality of X' or 'liable to X'". The text doesn't say when to use 'y' and when not; however, from the example given I guess that derivation from nouns keeps the original vowel while derivation from verbs changes the verb's final -u to -y-. Which, I suppose, makes sense, since you state earlier that "The final -u is not part of the root; it's a grammatical ending".

The same place also shows that consonants can get replaced by the -n- infix, rather than having it added, as in boh'tu --> bontur, which accounts for the loss of the r in parsu.

and from that the verb pansyru 'love'.

Ah, and this is "Nouns can be fairly freely converted into verbs by adding -u (replacing a final vowel)", I suppose -- even though this process is here applied to an adjective.

After all that, we get pensyniri 'I love you'

Hm, this is inconsistent. Most Kebreni verbs appear to have a CVC(V) structure with only two consonants and one stem vowel in the root (plus one ending vowel), so which vowel to modify becomes obvious. What is not stated is which vowel is the stem vowel in verbs having more than one vowel in the root.

The process of forming the perfective involves switching "the last two vowels", which is clear enough. Similarly, volition involves switching "the first two vowels (that is, the added e- plus what was the first vowel of the root", which is also unambiguous. The three examples here show three single-vowel verbs, which means that the e- which got put switched into second position moves to the end, since it was also the second from the end.

The hard mood(?) to form is the benefactive (and its companion, the antibenefactive. These talk about "fronting (or backing) the stem vowel", without saying which vowel in a multi-vowel root is the stem vowel.

The example seen a bit later in the conjugation table is pabadu "laugh". This has the two vowels a and a in the root. The benefactive given here is pabedi, indicating that the second a got fronted to e and not the first. (It also gives the volitional forms, imperfective and perfective, as abebadu and abebuda respectively, thus showing that the e- does not move to the end here and that "first two vowels" and "last two vowels" is always taken literally, even when those sets do not overlap.)

However, this would imply that the verb pansyru, with the root vowels a and y, has the stem vowel y, since that's the second vowel of the root; this fronts to i. The benefactive would then be not pensyri but pansiri (or, for benefactive to the listener, pansiniri).

'loving is going on that benefits you'

This reminds me of "It stones whileunder it grows greeningly." and "Vance may be in a state of pulling our legs" :-)

Cheers,
Philip.


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