Kaltxì, ma frapo.
Whether you’ve been celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Saturnalia, Festivus, or anything else, I hope this holiday season has been, and continues fo be, a healthy and happy one for you all.
Before anything else, I want to reassure you that I haven’t forgotten about the UDHR submissions! I was hoping to have some comments for you by this time, but other matters have intervened. I will, however, get to them in the next few days. Ayngeyä tìmweypeyri irayo!
In the meantime, here are some odds and ends I hope you’ll find useful:
More on indirect questions
There’s nothing here that’s really new. It’s more of a completion of things we already know.
Many of you have seen this explanation before—back in 2011, actually!—but I think it’s worth a review. An Indirect question is a question embedded in another sentence, which allows you talk about the question. For example, “Why did he leave?” is a direct question; “I know why he left” is indirect, where the speaker is commenting on the direct question. As this example shows, some languages—English, for instance—require different syntax for direct and indirect questions:
DIRECT
Why did he leave?
*Why he left?
INDIRECT
*I know why did he leave.
I know why he left.
As you know, Na’vi prefers directness, retaining the original quote for reported speech and the original question for embedded questions. So rather than the equivalent of “She said she would come,” Na’vi retains the speaker’s original statement: Poltxe po san oe zasya’u sìk, “She said (quote), ‘I will come’ (unquote).’
For embedded questions, Na’vi makes the underlying semantics clear. When we say, “I know why he left,” what are we really saying? It’s that we know the answer to the question, “Why did he leave?” Na’vi spells this out explicitly, using the noun for answer, tì’eyng, in a shortened form, teyng,as the base of various subordinate conjunctions: tì’eyng + a teyngla, tì’eyngit + a –> teyngta, etc.
Our example sentence ‘I know why he left’ then becomes Omum oel teyngta lumpe po holum. In tortured English, this is essentially, “I know the why-did-he-leave answer.’
With that in mind, here are the teyng-forms we’ve already seen:
SUBJECTIVE: teynga
Teynga lumpe po holum ke lu law.
‘It’s not clear why he left.’
AGENTIVE: teyngla
Teyngla lumpe po holum oeti heykolangham.
‘Why he left made me laugh.’
PATIENTIVE: teyngta
Omum oel teyngta lumpe po holum.
‘I know why he left.’
That’s what we’ve seen up to now. But teyng exists in the other three cases as well:
DATIVE: teyngra (from tì’eyngur + a)
Rutxe law sivi teyngra lumpe po holum.
‘Please clarify why he left.’
GENITIVE: teyngä (from tì’eyngä + a)
Tìrunìl teyngä lumpe po holum oeti keftxo ’eykolefu.
‘The discovery of why he left saddened me.’
tìrun (n., tì.RUN) ‘discovery’
TOPICAL: teyngria (from tì’eyngri + a)
Teyngria lumpe po holum oel ke tslam ke’ut.
‘I understand nothing about why he left.’
(‘As for why he left, I understand nothing.’)
Note: The dative and topical forms were submitted to me by the LEP a little over a year ago. Irayo nìtxan, ma smuk!
One more thing: teyng can take adpositions too. For example:
Ayoe perängkxo teri teynga lumpe po holum.
‘We’re chatting about why he left.’
Moving on, here are a few things I’ve discussed with people privately via email that I’d like to share with everyone:
<ay> and <ìy> vs. <asy> and <ìsy>
A question arose about the “intentional future” infixes, the ones with s. How would we translate the well-known quote from Lord of the Rings, “You shall not pass!” Using ftem ‘pass by,’ would it be Ngal oeti ke ftìyem Or Ngal oeti ke ftìsyem? This was my response:
I would say that for “You shall not pass!” it’s better not to use <ìsy> and just use <ìy>. As you know, adding the s to the future infixes adds the idea of intent to a simple prediction about the future. That’s why the sy-forms are used exclusively in the first person: You know what your own intentions are, but you can’t make assertions about someone else’s, since you’re not in their head.
When you say Oe hasyum, you’re actually saying two things: (1) Something is going to happen, i.e., my departure; (2) it’s going to happen because it’s my intention—i.e., I am going to cause it to happen. (Of course, we have sentences like, “John intends to leave,” but that’s a little different. It’s making a statement about John’s current mindset as we understand it, but it’s not really making a prediction about the future. John may wind up not leaving at all, due to circumstances beyond his control.) For “You shall not pass,” we’re not saying, “Your intention is not to pass,” or that “I can compel you to intend not to pass.” It’s really a simple prediction about your behavior, even though it’s based on my own intentions.
Counterfactual ‘should have’
A question arose about how to express counterfactual ‘should have’ expressions in Na’vi as in, “You should have gone (but you didn’t).” Here’s what I wrote:
As you know, “should” in Na’vi is sweylu, which literally means, “it’s best (that).”
So “You should (counterfactually) have gone” is actually “If you had gone, it would have been better.”
From the rules we’ve seen, this is:
(1) Zun nga kilvä, zel sweylilvu. Turning it around:
(2) Zel sweylilvu zun nga kilvä.
But we also know that if the time of both clauses is the same, we can use the bare verb in the zel clause:
(3) Zun nga kilvä, zel sweylu. And turning that around,
(4) Zel sweylu zun nga kilvä.
Finally, in sentences like (4), we can omit zel in casual conversation to get:
(5) Sweylu zun nga kilvä.
So all of (1) through (5) are acceptable for “You should have gone.”
One wrinkle:
The above assumes that the “better” part was in the past: You didn’t go last year, and LAST YEAR it would have better if you HAD gone. But we could also mean that the better part is NOW: If you had gone last year, the situation would be better NOW. (There were negative consequences of the person’s not going that are affecting the present situation.) This changes (1) and (2) to:
(1’) Zun nga kilvä, zel sweylivu.
(2’) Zel sweylivu zun nga kilvä.
Note that there are no parallels to (3) and (4), since the verb in the zel clause can only go into the root form if the time of both clauses is the same:
(3’) *Zun nga kilvä, zel sweylu.
(4’) *Zel sweylu zun nga kilvä.
However, we can omit zel as in (5) to get:
(5’) Sweylivu zun nga kilvä.
And finally, a new idiom:
na fkxen eo fkio Literally, ‘like vegetable food before a tetrapteron.’
It’s used in the sense of ‘to go to waste.’ Tetrapterons (ayfkio) are predators and have no use for vegetable-based food. If you place vegetables before them, that food will go to waste.
Ngeyä fìtìkangkemvi atxantsan ke slayu na fkxen eo fkio.
‘This excellent work of yours will not go to waste.’
That’s it for now. Hayalovay!