Imperative mood

The imperative mood has a particular form in Kareyku. In essence it only works for the second person and it's the same whether it is singular or plural. The form it uses is somewhat strange due to historical changes which I will not discuss here (but may in the future). The form is: -nma, and it is inflected just like any other well-born transition has been inflected up to this point.

ikan tokinma!, protect me!

qappanma shu!, eat up!

You may ask yourself if one can use it in the passive, well yes you can. The form would be then;

tokeyma!, be protected!

I'm imagining it would be used as a kind of farewell or good wish. Note how the -n- drops but the infix remains the same. Now you may be wondering if the detransitive suffix will cause any problems, since it is essentially an -l- and it creates quite a pickle there. The answer is, the -nma applies for both transitive and intransitive verbs alike:

marinma!, come!

tinma!, do it!

tananma!, speak!

And so, the imperative can be used in all the tenses, but this would be very hard for me to explain without resorting to Ancient Greek. I will expand on this delicate item later on.

Detransitive suffix

You've read right, I meant a suffix that "detransitivizes" the verb if that has any sense at all. Bear with me, what I mean is that all Kareyku verbs are naturally transitive or ditransitive, but what if you need an intransitive verb? Well, you would use this crafty suffix to reduce the arguments to zero. The suffix, of course, takes all evidentials (and it will) and transitions, its form is an -l- inserted before the corresponding transition and we can see some examples:

We have our always useful verb qappa- "eat", normally we would use a transition;

qappata, he eats

But this actually means literally "he eats (something)", it implies that he's eating something, like a fish, meat, vegetables (yeah, right!) or something. When we use this suffix, though, we get;

qappalta, he eats

In this other case I'm just stating that he eats. It can mean "he eats (everyday)" or "he eats" (i.e. "he can eat"), it means all the other uses that are intransitive. So for example;

kolto marilta, he comes here

Of course we can inflect it for time, so one would treat the -ta as a normal transition, thus;

kolto marilten, he didn't come here

pokolto marilteyos, he shall come home

We can even further inflect it for the desiderative form:

taro mariltaltech, "father doesn't want to come"

Let's leave the entry with a final weird sentence:

pole nakem lau lopalkas, "I live on top of a great tree"

Suffixes revisited: The Desiderative Suffix

The Desiderative is properly a mood, not a tense, in Kareyku it is an infix that's attached to the verb and precedes the transition. This suffix is a reworking of a previous suffix I've mentioned, I'll make sure to straighten the whole thing up. In any case, the suffix is -tal- and we have some examples:

qappaka, I eat

qappatalka, I want to eat

This is how the Desiderative form works, pretty simple. If you want to negate the verb, you simply apply the negative transitions and you are done:

qappatalke, I don't want to eat

yeppatalke, I don't want to serve

This applies for all transitions and evidentials, of course;

inech yeppatalken, "yesterday I didn't want to attend you"

And we can even further apply other moods or voices, such as the passive;

kolla tokeytaltas, "the country wants to be protected"

Having set free this infix, I thought of reworking it into something much more useful such as this Desiderative form. In this way, nothing has been lost but a useful tool has been created to form such sentences as;

kollakume tokeytaltach, "for the sake of the country he wants to be protected"

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.

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.

The Future Tense

Under the new development of Kareyku we would only have 3 transitions according to hierarchy. The Future Tense would be expressed then:

1. expressed by infix -keyo-
2. expressed by infix -deyo-
3. expressed by infix -teyo-

Pretty simple, this would get us such constructions as:

qappakeyo I will eat
tokiteyo He will protect

Further developed with evidentials:

qappakeyo-s  I will eat (fact)
oshan tokiteyo-n I hear he will protect them
tanadeyo-ch You will speak to him (I assume)

As for their negative forms:

1. expressed by infix -ki-

2. expressed by infix -di-

3. expressed by infix -ti-

pile qappakis I will not eat fish

oshan tanakilcha I will obviously not talk to them

The Past Tense

The past tense employs in Kareyku the following transitions for the positive:

Transition 1 is expressed by infix -kan
Transition 2 is expressed by infix -dan
Transition 3 is expressed by infix -tan

So pretty much the same as the present plus the suffix -n. Thus the same happens for the negative, which is:

Transition 1 is expressed by infix -ken
Transition 2 is expressed by infix -den
Transition 3 is expressed by infix -ten

Pretty simple. Note that the past tense ends in -n and so when using an evidential it will take the long version. This is the explanation why you have long and short evidentials, the long ones are mostly used when the past is used, because Kareku doesn't allow nasal + consonant codas. Thus:

tokikansi. I protected (it). With fact evidential.
qappakanni. I ate (it). With hear-say evidential.

Transitions

Kareyku doesn't use pronominal affixes per se. Although it does have independent pronouns the verb is inflected with what are called "transitions". The transitions indicate the "who to whom" character of the verb. There are 3 main transitions:

From 1st person to someone else
From 2nd person to someone else
From 3rd person to someone else

In the last two cases independent pronouns are provided to avoid confusion when needed. The logic for Kareyku speakers behind this is that you can only know your intentions. When someone has a present only the giver can know if you are going to give the present to me or to him, hence, the most complete transitions are from the first person, the one I'm sure.

Transition 1 is expressed by infix -ka
Transition 2 is expressed by infix -da
Transition 3 is expressed by infix -ta

This transitions are only for the Present tense. Kareyku doesn't use a negative particle, there are two different conjugations, positive and negative, for each tense. The negatives being:

Transition 1 is expressed by infix -ke
Transition 2 is expressed by infix -de
Transition 3 is expressed by infix -te

So, if you have the verb qappa 'to eat', qappaka means 'I eat (it)'. If you use pilé meaning 'fish' then you get qappaka pilé 'I eat fish' and the negative would be qappake pilé 'I don't eat fish'. The transitions are needed even when there is a subject present, and intransitive verbs take a transition as a subject but regardless the object. Thus, qappaka, can mean 'I eat (it)' as well as 'I am eating'.