I've decided to tackle some verbal postbases before completing the nominal morphology, because there are so many things concerning the latter that I can't make up my mind about yet.
Besides, complex nominal morphology is not essential to expressing many things in basic Enello.
8. Introduction to Enello Postbases
A postbase is just a fancy word for a lexical suffix that makes a new word out of an existing word. Importantly, postbases cannot be used as words on their own, i.e. they are bound lexemes.
In Enello, many things that would be expressed by adjectives, adverbs, auxiliary verbs, modal verbs, or serial verb constructions in other languages can be expressed with postbases.
Postbases frequently change the word class of the word they are appended to, forming nouns from verbs and vice versa with relative ease.
Postbases are recursive, i.e. appending a verbaliser postbase to a word that contains a nominaliser postbase appended to a verbal root results in a new verb, etc.
The Verbaliser Postbase -sor
Let's start with a simple postbase:
-sor
-sor is a verbaliser postbase that can only be appended to nouns, and has the basic meaning of using something for its most "natural" purpose. It can thus be translated as
use, avail oneself of. If appended to a noun that indicates food or drink, it is best translated as
eat/drink/have. With nouns for clothes, it means
put on.
Here are some examples. For convenience, I have appended the 3rd person singular ending
-ů, but put the English translations in the infinitive.
mase -
pot
→
masesorů -
to cook, prepare food
kůno -
boat
→
kůnosorů -
to sail in a boat
arı -
flour; noodles
→
arısorů -
to eat/have noodles
kůbı -
milk
→
kůbısorů -
drink milk
Note that these verbs are intransitive and cannot take a further object. Also, the patient (e.g. noodles) is non-specific and/or indefinite.
Forming the -sor verb
The nouns in the above examples are all strong nouns, and
-sor is attached directly to the nominal stem.
In the case of frozen nouns, the initial
s is voiced and becomes
z:
naů -
bow
naůzorů -
to practice archery, hunt with a bow
Now comes the fun part: weak nouns! When
-sor is appended to a weak noun, the moon vowel weak stem is used and
-sor strengthens to
-ttsor or
-ddzor depending on whether the elided consonant is unvoiced or voiced.
To further clarify this, I've used C
V and C
U to indicate voiced and unvoiced gemination in the following consonant.
eka -
clothes →
eoCU-
→
eottsorů -
put on clothes, get dressed
oppaga -
paper →
oppaoCV-
→
oppaoddzorů -
(pej.) "eat paper", make a living from writing, work as a scribe/petty official
ıza -
pear →
ıeCV-
→
ıeddzorů -
to eat/have (some) pear(s)
seba -
fish →
seůCV-
→
seůddzorů -
to eat fish
In the case of weak nouns in
-na, -ma, the
s is nasalised resulting in
-nnor
fůna -
air →
fůeN-
→
fůennorů -
to take a breather, come up for air
bama -
hat →
baůN-
→
baůnnorů -
put on a hat
Conjugation and Usage
Here are the personal endings for verbs of the First Conjugation, to which verbs formed with
-sor belong.
Code: Select all
1s -ange
2s -oȷı
3s -ů
1p.EXCL -anngu
1p.INCL -anngına
2p -oȷına
3p -ůra
(I'm actually not entirely satisfied with the endings and may change them at some point.)
Verbs formed with
-sor are used when the focus is on the activity and not the patient of the sentence. They cannot be used to speak of eating/drinking/putting on a specific fish/glass of milk/hat. There are separate transitive verbs for all these things that take an agent an patient argument. These will be introduced when I deal with transitive verbs.
So that's it, I guess. I would like to know what you think. Do the sound shift patterns "work"?
Another thing: should I continue using colours to highlight the morphophonological patterns? Does it make things clearer, or the contrary?