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.