Columns of the Christophoronomicon

31st Lexember Word

2017-12-31T00:02:00.001+01:00

etíku [e̞ˈd͡ʑiˑɡʊ̆], intransitive verb: “to be/become new”

For this last day of Lexember 2017, and last day of 2017 itself, I tried to be at least slightly on topic :-).

Etíku refers to to things and concepts that are new, i.e. newly created or newly conceived. It can only be used of things and concepts, not of people or animals, except as a short cut (for instance, you would use etíku to refer to someone as a “new friend”, because the new thing in that case is not the person itself, but your friendship with them, and friendship is a concept).

A peculiarity of etíku is that it has what I call a “fragile vowel”. Simply put, its last, unstressed vowel u gets elided when various suffixes and clitics are added to the verb, even when one wouldn’t expect it to disappear according to the phonotactic rules of Haotyétpi (or its many sandhi rules). In other words, while etíku appears as such when used on its own, when suffixes and clitics are involved, the actual stem of this verb is etík.

So that’s it for Lexember 2017. I hope you enjoyed my additions to the Haotyétpi language. I know I had fun coining these words, and they’ve made me think really hard about the culture underlying this language. Don’t hesitate to comment or ask questions about the words I created this month, and see you again next Lexember!

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30th Lexember Word

2017-12-30T00:03:00.001+01:00

ompáw [o̞mˈbä͡ʊ], alienably possessed positional: “earlier moment, earlier time; beforehand”

To expand on yesterday’s renás, we now have its opposite. While renás refers to a moment later in time than the time that is relevant to the conversation, ompáw refers to a moment earlier than that time.

Apart from that difference in meaning, ompáw behaves pretty much in the same way as renás. It’s also a positional, meaning it can be used adverbially to mean “before that time, beforehand”.

An interesting use of renás and ompáw is as modifiers of other nouns referring to moments in time. This is done first by adding the copula -(s)e to these nouns (yes, in Haotyétpi, the copula is a suffix), and then using the result as a relative clause completing another noun. When doing so, we get renáse, which in this context means “following” or “next”, and ompáwse, which means in this case “previous” or “last”. For instance, with nów: “month”, we can form renáse nów ta: “next month”, and ompáwse nów ta: “last month” (=ta is mandatory here, as nów is not a positional). It’s an interesting usage, and a pattern that is found in various places in Haotyétpi.

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29th Lexember Word

2017-12-29T00:03:00.001+01:00

renás [ɾe̞ˈnäˑɕ], alienably possessed positional: “later moment, later time; afterwards”

Now for something completely different! Or, in this case, not “now”, but “later” :-P. Simply put, renás is a noun that refers to a moment in time later than whatever moment in time is relevant at this point in the conversation. That moment can be “now”, but it can also be some point of time in the past or the future. It doesn’t matter when the relevant moment in time is, renás refers to a time after it.

A peculiarity of renás is that it is a positional. Positionals are a subtype of nouns that usually refer to locations, in space or time, and have a somewhat different behaviour from normal nouns regarding the use of locative particles. In particular, when they are used with the plain locative particle =ta (“at, on, in”), that particle can actually be omitted. Effectively, this means such nouns can be used as is with an adverbial meaning of “at + location”. Examples of such nouns are ciéke (“house” -> ciékun: “at home”, literally “(at) my house”) and ké (“day” -> kaam ké: “today”, literally “this day”). That’s why renás can be used on its own to mean “afterwards”, i.e. literally “(at) a later time”. It’s not wrong to say renás ta, but it’s felt as redundant and thus would only be used to be emphatic.

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28th Lexember Word

2017-12-28T00:08:00.001+01:00

yakisú [jäd͡ʑɪˈzuˑ], transitive verb: “to hurt (s.o. or sthg)”

As I explained yesterday, akimés can mean “to hurt”, but only in its intransitive sense. In Haotyétpi, valency is an important property of a verb, and a verb cannot usually change valency without an explicit voice affix being added to it. This is very different to English, where many verbs can be used transitively and intransitively without a single morphological change.

So akimés can only be used to mean “to hurt” in the sense of “my foot hurts”. If you’d rather say “I hurt my foot”, you need to use another verb, in this case yakisú.

Yakisú is used when it’s the object that is in pain (and that object can be a person or a body part, basically like the subject of akimés), and the subject is the cause of that pain (or its unwitting facilitator, as it often enough happens :-P).

In terms of morphology, yakisú is formed using the verb-forming suffix -su, basically the opposite of -mes (-mes marks attachment, -su marks emission). The y- prefix it also sports is common in verbs that refer to a sensation or a feeling, or verbs referring to the workings of one’s brains (like yortamés: “to remember” and yortasú: “to suppose”). It originates from an applicative voice prefix that isn’t productive anymore.

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27th Lexember Word

2017-12-27T00:02:00.001+01:00

akimés [äd͡ʑɪˈmëːɕ], intransitive verb: “to hurt, to be painful, to be in pain”

Expanding on yesterday’s noun, we now have the associated verb. In terms of morphology, this verb is formed like urmés, with the -mes verb-forming suffix. To explain its shape, either -mes was added to akíhi which lost its last, unstressed syllable as a result (a likely outcome: syllables in direct post-stress position are very weak in Haotyétpi), or -mes was added directly to the interjection akí (not as unlikely as one might think). It’s not possible to rule out either of these origins. This uncertainty does not change anything about the meaning of this verb though.

Akimés is an intransitive, stative verb, referring to the state of pain (or, in a more dynamic meaning, referring to reaching that state). Its subject is always either the person experiencing pain, or the specific body part that hurts them. It cannot be used in the transitive sense of “to hurt (s.o.)”. We’ll see how that is done tomorrow :-).

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26th Lexember Word

2017-12-26T00:02:00.001+01:00

akíhi [äˈd͡ʑiˑʝɪ̆], alienably possessed noun: “pain”

So, while this may not be a very Christmas-y kind of word (here in the Netherlands we celebrate Boxing Day as “2nd Christmas Day”, so it’ll still be Christmas here when this post is published :-)), my shoulder is killing me as I am typing this, and my husband had to have a tooth extracted yesterday, so I really couldn’t think of any other word to coin.

Quite simply, akíhi refers to the very disagreeable sensation one gets when hurt. In principle, it refers to physical pain only, and the word is probably of onomatopoeic origin: the cry of pain that is transcribed as “ouch” or “ow” in English is akí or akkí in Haotyétpi.

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25th Lexember Word

2017-12-25T00:02:00.001+01:00

eów [e̞ˈo̞͡ʊ], intransitive verb: “to be/become white”

I already knew of the verb réy, which refers to both lack of colour (“to be/become black”) and lack of light (“to be/become dark”). Moreover, I already knew that verb has an antonym: murí. However, murí is the opposite of réy only in the “light” sense, not in the “colour” sense. In other words, murí strictly means “to be/become bright/light”, and not “to be/become white”. So réy had to have another opposite for the “colour” sense. And I finally found it: eów.

Just like murí opposes réy on the “light-dark” scale, eów opposes réy on the “white-black” scale.

Notice that eów is never used to refer to a skin colour, except maybe for corpses and people with skin diseases. The Mountain Folk themselves do not have what people in Europe and the US would consider “white” skin anyway.

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24th Lexember Word

2017-12-24T00:03:00.001+01:00

urmésko [uɾˈme̞ˑɕkə̆], nominalisation: “named person, child, boy, girl, teenager”

So far we’ve been so busy talking about namelessness and how nameless children are referred to despite their namelessness that we haven’t talked about what happens afterwards, when they have actually been named. How do you refer to them once that’s happened?

Now, we’ve seen that for nameless children, we have words like turáppo, ussáppo (rarely), and things I’ve not mentioned yet like poyá (“child”, i.e. offspring of someone), hóm (“son”) or tán (“daughter”). For adults (i.e. people who have come of age), kár (“person”) does nicely, or more rarely urák (“human being”, used to refer to Mountain Folk only). But for people that have received a name but haven’t yet come of age (i.e. between the ages of about 3 to about 16), the Mountain Folk prefer not to use any of the options I just gave:

Ussáppo is just not valid anymore for named children, and it is insulting;
Turáppo is only usable for nameless children, except in certain specific contexts (it could still find its way on school reports for instance :-) );
Poyá, hóm and tán simply feel too “childish” to be used on children older than 3, except when the speaker is a parent of the child in question;
Kár and urák, on the other hand, feel too “adult” to be used on children that have yet to undergo their coming of age ceremony.

So, what’s a good Haotyétpi speaker to do in this situation? In this case, a common way is, rather boringly, to use the nominalisation of urmés. And indeed, urmésko (“one who is named”) has become so associated with children and teenagers that it’s never used of adults, despite the fact that adults have names as well.

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23rd Lexember Word

2017-12-23T00:03:00.001+01:00

turáppo [tuˈɾäˑpːə̆], nominalisation: “baby, nameless child”

As I mentioned before, the “logical” way to refer to a nameless child or baby, i.e. the word ussáppo, has taken on such a negative connotation that it’s hardly ever used that way anymore. But people still need a way to refer to babies, don’t they? How can they do so?

That’s where turáppo comes in. When a serviceable word becomes so pejorative that it cannot be used in its original sense anymore, people will either start extending another word to cover that sense, or create a new way to refer to that sense. In this case, the Haotyétpi speakers chose the second method. They started referring to unnamed children as turáppo, which is the nominalisation of turáp, a verb which when used intransitively means “to be able to be, to be able to exist” (it’s the potential form of ás: “to be, to exist”). In other words, it means “one that can be, one that can exist, one that has potential”.

This way of referring to children goes very well with the Mountain Folk point of view that nameless children have the potential to be many things, hence they shouldn’t hastily be given a name that may not fit what they are going to become. Also, it is a very positive way of referring to someone, even if that person were to be an adult, so there is little chance that the word will get a negative connotation anytime soon.

Because of that, the use of turáppo has spread among the Haotyétpi speaking community quite fast, despite it being a relatively recent coinage (at least when used in that sense), and is now the standard way of referring to babies or nameless children. It is, however, never used as a temporary name for nameless children. The main reason is probably the very positive connotation this word brings, which clashes with the strong tradition to use words with negative connotations to call nameless children.

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22nd Lexember Word

2017-12-22T00:03:00.001+01:00

ussáp ortáse [uˈsːäˑp o̞ɾˈtäˑʑə̆], noun phrase: “nameless god(s)/spirit(s)“

These last few days, I’ve kept mentioning these “malevolent spirits” that could discover and attack children if they were given a name too early. As it happens, the Mountain Folk have a generic name for these spirits, so I might as well mention it. In Haotyétpi, these spirits are called ussáp ortáse, i.e. “nameless spirits” or “nameless gods” (the traditional Mountain Folk animist religion does not really make a distinction between spirits and gods).

According to tradition, these “nameless gods” are spirits that for some reason lost their names. Either they got their names stolen by other spirits, or they lost them to an unnaming ceremony performed by human beings (according to Mountain Folk beliefs, the spirits must be respected and honoured to maintain balance in the world, but that respect must go both ways, and humans are entitled to punish spirits for not doing their part of the bargain), or they simply lost them to carelessness or wickedness. As I mentioned before, names have power in Mountain Folk beliefs, and for a spirit losing one’s name is equivalent to losing most of one’s identity. The god loses form, purpose and even most of its capacity to reason (if it had any) and becomes a formless, wandering spirit that yearns only one thing: to fill in the gap left by its lost name. Such spirits tend then to aggregate and will try to attack other spirits or even humans to steal them their strength, their health, their turá, even their name if they can.

The effect on people, according to traditional Mountain Folk beliefs, is diseases, i.e. the ussáp ortáse were traditionally considered to be the main cause of diseases, hence the need to ward people, especially young children and babies, against such spirits.

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