Sunday 7 August 2011

Kareyku verbs, Direct/inverse voice

Recently I've decided to lean towards a direct/inverse voice in Kareyku. This would allow for potentially better structures and leads to new options in expression. I've decided the flow should follow a hierarchy, so with this new plan the transitions would be:

  1. 1st > someone, -ka
  2. 2nd > someone (3rd, 3rd.a), -da
  3. 3rd > someone (3rd.a), -ta

This would go for the direct voice, the inverse voice would reverse the flow, so, with the inverse you would have:

  1. 1st < someone, -talka
  2. 2nd < someone, -talda
  3. 3rd < someone, -talta

So in this new plan there is more clarity but at the same time I've managed to preserve the ambiguities. And the infix only reverts the hierarchical flow in 1 step. So a sentence would look like:
qorikas, qoritalkas?
I love you, do you love me?

With the proper evidentials. It is worth noting that the inverse could be taken as "do you love me" or even "am I loved?" if you decide to use the 3rd person, you get a kind of impersonal or passive construction.
qoritaltan
Someone loves him, I hear.
If clarity is needed, pronouns should be used. Maybe pen toritalkas? would appear clearer to avoid confusion, although context may make them unnecessary, as Kareyku is a pro-drop language with a lot of contextual information needed.


Tuesday 12 April 2011

The Conditional

Kareyku has a Conditional mood used for polite asking and suppositions as well. Actually this and the Future Tense actually stem from a quite particular development in Kareyku grammar. It is believed that Old Kareyku actually only distinguished between Realis and Irrealis moods. Part of this can be seen in that the "pure" verbal themes seem to be the Present Simple for the Realis mood and the Future/Conditional for the Irrealis which split into two early in Kareyku's history. The distinction originally was that of "what really happens" and what "didn't really happen".

The first development of Kareyku grammar seems to be the Past Tense, which stems from the Present (note that both use the same particles) plus a Reportative Evidential, that is to say the -n. This seems to point to the origin of Past as a reporting of the Present, "they say this happened". For the Irrealis "that has not really happened" it split into two from the same root, the "has not happened yet", i.e. the Future and the "has not happened but could", i.e. what would evolve to the Conditional. Interestingly enough they come from an Old K. *-kœː- for the positive and *-kœːi- with i-umlaut for the negative, which extended its root thus; *-kœː- > *-kœːʲœ-; and *-kœːʲœi- with expected turns towards o-coloring and e-coloring for positive and negative.

Thusly we arrive to the Conditional:

1. expressed by infix -ko-
2. expressed by infix -do-
3. expressed by infix -to-



For the positive and:


1. expressed by infix -keye-
2. expressed by infix -deye-
3. expressed by infix -teye-



For the negative. Whence specialists believe that the original sequence -ko/-ki was positive Conditional, Irrealis, or Theoretical mood, and negative Future. In Classic and Archaic poetry the positive conditional is often employed as a refined positive future, with the sense "this could come to happen". All this is in agreement with the fact that Kareyku culture considers certainty as undesirable or otherwise impolite, so you can say for instance that "the stars will not fall" but "the Sun could always rise", asserting a truth unchecked in the positive is irrespectful to both humans and nature alike.