Dreamlandic is a hatelang in the sense that I would hate to have to speak it, but not in the sense that I hate to work on it. (I have some languages that qualify as both, but to nobody's surprise, I never get anywhere with them.) Dreamlandic separated from its common ancestor with Play, called MRCA, about 4,700 years ago, and although the languages have a few things in common, almost every change that happened in both branches pushed them further apart.
CULTURE
Dreamlandic is an extremely analytic language, not only grammatically but also semantically. Even the most basic concepts such as body parts and verbs of motion must be expressed by phrases rather than single words. This is largely due to the sound changes which led the language to inherit a very small effective word space, as the language is entirely CV, with only eight consonants, and about half of all roots begin with vowels. At one stage, the speakers formed compounds, but in modern Dreamlandic, this has entirely fallen away and the only new coinages are phrases composed of at least two words linked by a particle, often with more words in between. For example the word for dream is babe se ōronānu, "abstract-object of dream-feel-GEN.NOM". (GEN.NOM is my ad hoc name for a genitive nominalizer like English -ity or -liness). The only content word in this phrase is ōro "dream", but this word cannot be used alone because it has merged with many unrelated homophones. Many Dreamlandic affixes seem to undo each other, but these cannot be omitted because they are needed to distinguish homophones. Verbs are also sprawled out; the verb for "sit on" is se ā obo, meaning to press on something with one's hips and buttocks. Here, o is nearly semantically empty and could be compared to English "do" or "get". Nearly all verbs require the instrument to be explicitly stated, and this will be a body part for most verbs of motion or states of being.
Thus Dreamlandic takes far longer to express most concepts than does Play. Their homelands were thousands of miles apart, but they had mutual contacts through diplomacy. Despite the two groups being political enemies for nearly all of their history, linguists transcended politics and sometimes exchanged literature in the other group's language. The Players early on decided they were uninterested in learning Dreamlandic; they found it to be an insult to their own language merely by how it seemed to do everything differently. A saying emerged that the Dreamers had no translation for the Play word sipīm "I need to use the bathroom", because by the time anyone was able to finish saying the equivalent Dreamlandic sentence it would be too late. The Dreamers found Play mystifying and were impressed at its ability to express complex thoughts so concisely, but had no opportunity to learn it as the Players were not quite so forthcoming at giving away the secrets of their language, whose difficulty was a strength in times of war.
Dreamlandic was so notorious for its plodding pace that, when stable friendly diplomatic relations finally emerged in the wake of a series of wars in which Play speakers fed upon each other, the Dreamer leaders decided the best thing they could do was to abandon their own language in favor of Leaper, another language that had separated from the MRCA several thousand years ago and was seen as culturally neutral. The enemies of the Dreamers supported this move for various reasons, one being that their diplomats did not enjoy speaking Dreamlandic, and another being that some of the other cultures feared that Dreamlandic, despite its inefficiency, wielded outsize cultural influence over other languages particularly through its logographic script, which was much more visually appealing than the box-like scripts of most other languages at the time.
Dreamlandic (and other non-Play) scratchpad
Dreamlandic (and other non-Play) scratchpad
Makapappi nauppakiba.
The wolf-sheep ate itself. (Play)
The wolf-sheep ate itself. (Play)
Re: Dreamlandic (and other non-Play) scratchpad
OCCUPATIONS
As with most other words, Dreamlandic uses phrases to denote various human occupations. These phrases seem overwrought compared to Play, where most occupation words are formed from a one or two-morpheme word plus the agentive suffix -(t)a. By contrast, in Dreamlandic, they are built around the habitual form of a verb, and those verbs, like most other verbs, are preceded by various particles, indicating among other things the instrument of the action. For example one can speak of a
pa sē bu sokosiō,
which taken literally indicates a person (pa) who uses (se) their hands (-e) to play (sokosā) with themselves (bu) for money (bu; chance repetition in set phrases is often telescoped; since money is involved in most occupations, they have all been re-interpreted as reflexive verbs). This does not mean what one might think it means, because of the semantic bleaching that has taken place in nearly all of the involved particles. Only the content word remains true to its original meaning, and thus the meaning of the phrase pa sē bu sokosiō is an athlete who plays sports.
The meaning of the content word thus determines the meaning of the entire phrase. Dreamers have a very simple world view. For example, the essence of being a carpenter (pa sē bu moresiō) is not the building of furniture, or the hammer and nails, nor even the presence of wood, but the arm motion one makes when wielding the hammer. This trait of keeping the action as close to the agent as possible and demoting all other arguments to "instruments" is present in other languages such as Play, but Dreamlandic's sprawling sentence structure means this affects the syntax in ways that other languages can handle through compounding and lexicalization. For example, the Play word for carpenter, žammiŋua, translates literally as someone who loves wood, but in Dreamlandic there is no convenient way to add in the object of the verb, and even if doing so, the object would be a hammer and not a nail or a piece of wood, because the verb is the carpenter's hand motion.
The habitual forms of verbs actually look like nouns, and can be inflected for case. Even though Dreamlandic is extremely analytic, it is not quite isolating. (I speak of Dreamlandic as a semantically analytic language to show this distinction.) Thus, for example, the word for carpenter in the accusative case is pa sē bu moresiopa, where the part that changes is not the noun pa "human" but the final word moresiō "(habitually) swinging (one's hand)". (Indeed, it's possible I will loosen up and allow the words for occupations to shrink to just their final word, but not all occupation words are built from the pa se bu formula, so even if one might think it would be sure to happen I won't commit to it.)
As with most other words, Dreamlandic uses phrases to denote various human occupations. These phrases seem overwrought compared to Play, where most occupation words are formed from a one or two-morpheme word plus the agentive suffix -(t)a. By contrast, in Dreamlandic, they are built around the habitual form of a verb, and those verbs, like most other verbs, are preceded by various particles, indicating among other things the instrument of the action. For example one can speak of a
pa sē bu sokosiō,
which taken literally indicates a person (pa) who uses (se) their hands (-e) to play (sokosā) with themselves (bu) for money (bu; chance repetition in set phrases is often telescoped; since money is involved in most occupations, they have all been re-interpreted as reflexive verbs). This does not mean what one might think it means, because of the semantic bleaching that has taken place in nearly all of the involved particles. Only the content word remains true to its original meaning, and thus the meaning of the phrase pa sē bu sokosiō is an athlete who plays sports.
The meaning of the content word thus determines the meaning of the entire phrase. Dreamers have a very simple world view. For example, the essence of being a carpenter (pa sē bu moresiō) is not the building of furniture, or the hammer and nails, nor even the presence of wood, but the arm motion one makes when wielding the hammer. This trait of keeping the action as close to the agent as possible and demoting all other arguments to "instruments" is present in other languages such as Play, but Dreamlandic's sprawling sentence structure means this affects the syntax in ways that other languages can handle through compounding and lexicalization. For example, the Play word for carpenter, žammiŋua, translates literally as someone who loves wood, but in Dreamlandic there is no convenient way to add in the object of the verb, and even if doing so, the object would be a hammer and not a nail or a piece of wood, because the verb is the carpenter's hand motion.
The habitual forms of verbs actually look like nouns, and can be inflected for case. Even though Dreamlandic is extremely analytic, it is not quite isolating. (I speak of Dreamlandic as a semantically analytic language to show this distinction.) Thus, for example, the word for carpenter in the accusative case is pa sē bu moresiopa, where the part that changes is not the noun pa "human" but the final word moresiō "(habitually) swinging (one's hand)". (Indeed, it's possible I will loosen up and allow the words for occupations to shrink to just their final word, but not all occupation words are built from the pa se bu formula, so even if one might think it would be sure to happen I won't commit to it.)
Makapappi nauppakiba.
The wolf-sheep ate itself. (Play)
The wolf-sheep ate itself. (Play)
Re: Dreamlandic (and other non-Play) scratchpad
A note on the naming of my languages .... all of my newer projects use English words as exonyms, and a longstanding tradition in this world was to unite the concepts of tribe and political party, making most (though not all) nations single-party ethnostates or nations where one tribe has most of the power in society. Many of these parties encouraged conversion, but language barriers and other political problems prevented too many people from doing this, and some parties were closed-entry particularly those that rule by force and do not need a majority.
Thus the Play language got its name when the party's founders overthrew their Leaper-speaking rulers and abolished child labor.
In a few cases, such as Dreamlandic, I actually dont remember the world-internal reason for choosing the name. I wasnt nearly as careful when I was younger. The Dreamers are one of the few nations on the planet where men are taller than women, so they seemed exotic even in their own nation. But I didnt make the decision to have women taller than men until many years after I had laid out the world map and placed Dreamland in the west.
Standing at the opposite extreme is the Moonshine language, referring to its speakers' total domination of society by women. I may not have known that moonshine was a drink when I coined this name, as it was quite long ago. The internal name may have had to do with stars or the dark rather than the moon specifically, but for my sake I will keep calling the language Moonshine. It's also possible that they would use the moon after all because of menstruation. But the point is that women are the cold sex in their worldview, and men (despite being smaller) are seen as active and associated with heat.
The Lava Bed languages are not an in-world reference at all, but rather my external name for a clade of languages whose grammar is so complex that inflections can erupt anywhere within a word.
EDIT: Rather than base their culture's name on the human menstrual cycle, it may be that the moon is the womb, and menstruation is just what happens when it needs to "refill".
Thus the Play language got its name when the party's founders overthrew their Leaper-speaking rulers and abolished child labor.
In a few cases, such as Dreamlandic, I actually dont remember the world-internal reason for choosing the name. I wasnt nearly as careful when I was younger. The Dreamers are one of the few nations on the planet where men are taller than women, so they seemed exotic even in their own nation. But I didnt make the decision to have women taller than men until many years after I had laid out the world map and placed Dreamland in the west.
Standing at the opposite extreme is the Moonshine language, referring to its speakers' total domination of society by women. I may not have known that moonshine was a drink when I coined this name, as it was quite long ago. The internal name may have had to do with stars or the dark rather than the moon specifically, but for my sake I will keep calling the language Moonshine. It's also possible that they would use the moon after all because of menstruation. But the point is that women are the cold sex in their worldview, and men (despite being smaller) are seen as active and associated with heat.
The Lava Bed languages are not an in-world reference at all, but rather my external name for a clade of languages whose grammar is so complex that inflections can erupt anywhere within a word.
EDIT: Rather than base their culture's name on the human menstrual cycle, it may be that the moon is the womb, and menstruation is just what happens when it needs to "refill".
Makapappi nauppakiba.
The wolf-sheep ate itself. (Play)
The wolf-sheep ate itself. (Play)
Re: Dreamlandic (and other non-Play) scratchpad
I'd like to evolve a verbal paradigm that blends fusional and agglutinative morphology for Leaper, the language of world diplomacy. Leaper separated from Play 2,300 years before the present time, each evolving rapidly along their own path with little influence in either direction despite their remaining geographically close. (This makes it about half as distant from Play as the Play-Leaper clade is from Dreamlandic.)
Play's are-you-kidding-me fusional morphology, where in some cases every letter in the word can change to show a certain inflection (bes > pi "hurt; bite"), dies out fairly early in Leaper for two reasons: 1) Leaper's rapid sound changes merged too many of the forms together for them to be rescued by analogy, and 2) when Leaper did use analogy, it more often chose the path of further destruction whereas Play rescued the collapsing forms. While I suspect languages most often evolve from agglutinative to fusional rather than the other way around, I'd like to do as much of this as I can by plucking happenstance coincidences out of the decaying fusional paradigm wherever I see them.
Play and Leaper have the same syllable structure: CVC. The two languages have a very different sound, as is obvious from even a small sample of both. Leapers remarking that Play sounded like a language for babies also remarked at how Play was so difficult to learn that Play spies communicated openly rather than using codes. Nonetheless, the languages have many things in common, and it is often possible for me to tie a Play morpheme or morpheme sequence directly to an equivalent in Leaper or at least in the early stages of Leaper before the system that stood up so well in Play broke down.
I would like the language to have just a tiny closed class of strong verbs, those being the verbs that conjugate with infixes and internal mutations like those of Play. Even these inflections are a reduced system because there were many mergers. Perhaps the most common consonant in Leaper, at least underlyingly, is the voiced velar fricative g, which becomes silent next to any other consonant except for a preceding nasal.
This makes the inherited word gi "deed" the ideal form to use to make weak verbs, since it is the form that will best preserve the infixes, which will then appear to be suffixes. But I've already hit a barrier, because one advantage of making weak verbs is that I can use the inherited CVC noun forms for nearly all verbs, eliminating the need (as in Play) to learn two stems for every single lexeme. But these final consonants will overhang the syllable boundary and therefore merge with the inflections after all. Thus I don't have much to show for this now.
One other important thing, though, is that unlike Play, Leaper has true bound morphemes, that can never occur alone because they consist of single consonants or of sequences that end in an illegal consonant. This never happens in Play. In Play, for example, many kinship terms and many mood markers begin with t-, but none of the words in either of these groups can be broken down into a morpheme consisting of a single /t/ followed by a content word. By contrast, in Leaper, I've already begun the process of unetymological rebracketing, creating for example a true morpheme h- "if; because", and which will likely take on several other meanings as well. This must be followed by a vowel, and that vowel will also be reanalyzed as a standalone morpheme.
That's all for now but mostly because I want to get this up on the screen before I add more.
Play's are-you-kidding-me fusional morphology, where in some cases every letter in the word can change to show a certain inflection (bes > pi "hurt; bite"), dies out fairly early in Leaper for two reasons: 1) Leaper's rapid sound changes merged too many of the forms together for them to be rescued by analogy, and 2) when Leaper did use analogy, it more often chose the path of further destruction whereas Play rescued the collapsing forms. While I suspect languages most often evolve from agglutinative to fusional rather than the other way around, I'd like to do as much of this as I can by plucking happenstance coincidences out of the decaying fusional paradigm wherever I see them.
Play and Leaper have the same syllable structure: CVC. The two languages have a very different sound, as is obvious from even a small sample of both. Leapers remarking that Play sounded like a language for babies also remarked at how Play was so difficult to learn that Play spies communicated openly rather than using codes. Nonetheless, the languages have many things in common, and it is often possible for me to tie a Play morpheme or morpheme sequence directly to an equivalent in Leaper or at least in the early stages of Leaper before the system that stood up so well in Play broke down.
I would like the language to have just a tiny closed class of strong verbs, those being the verbs that conjugate with infixes and internal mutations like those of Play. Even these inflections are a reduced system because there were many mergers. Perhaps the most common consonant in Leaper, at least underlyingly, is the voiced velar fricative g, which becomes silent next to any other consonant except for a preceding nasal.
This makes the inherited word gi "deed" the ideal form to use to make weak verbs, since it is the form that will best preserve the infixes, which will then appear to be suffixes. But I've already hit a barrier, because one advantage of making weak verbs is that I can use the inherited CVC noun forms for nearly all verbs, eliminating the need (as in Play) to learn two stems for every single lexeme. But these final consonants will overhang the syllable boundary and therefore merge with the inflections after all. Thus I don't have much to show for this now.
One other important thing, though, is that unlike Play, Leaper has true bound morphemes, that can never occur alone because they consist of single consonants or of sequences that end in an illegal consonant. This never happens in Play. In Play, for example, many kinship terms and many mood markers begin with t-, but none of the words in either of these groups can be broken down into a morpheme consisting of a single /t/ followed by a content word. By contrast, in Leaper, I've already begun the process of unetymological rebracketing, creating for example a true morpheme h- "if; because", and which will likely take on several other meanings as well. This must be followed by a vowel, and that vowel will also be reanalyzed as a standalone morpheme.
That's all for now but mostly because I want to get this up on the screen before I add more.
Makapappi nauppakiba.
The wolf-sheep ate itself. (Play)
The wolf-sheep ate itself. (Play)
Re: Dreamlandic (and other non-Play) scratchpad
Three of the Leaper mood markers can be matched to four of Play's. Play's tau tata tiu tetu correspond directly to Leaper's kʷa kʷa kʷi kʷo, assuming that the forms were created before the two languages separated (and they need to be, for reasons I wont explain now), and assuming that they all survived in both languages. As above, one difference between Play and Leaper is that Leaper is willing to break down atomic morphemes that just happen to look alike. Here, a new morpheme /kʷ/ is created that indicates an irrealis(?) mood ... not sure about the terminology, but they are statements of belief. Perhaps more like evidentials than moods, but at least in Play, they occupy the mood slot and cannot be combined with other mood markers. Leaper might change that.
But this means that there are now also three standalone vocalic mood suffixes, -a -i -o, corresponding to no original MRCA or Lava Bed morpheme. Here, they are on a spectrum; -a indicates strong belief, -i indicates a positive affirmation of a weak belief (roughly English "hopefully"), and -o indicates doubt. It's worth noting that while Leaper has five vowels /a e i o u/, only /a i o/ are the "system" vowels, corresponding mostly to Play /a i u/, whereas /e u/ in Leaper are usually secondary developments. This means that many things occur in sets of three, rarely in five.
The lost fourth mood is Play's cover-all potential mood, which could be said to enwrap the other three. Leaper could solve this by innovating a new suffix that would go after the /kʷ/ mood marker, since /kʷ/ is now a morpheme on its own, but I havent gotten to that yet. Also, I just noticed that a bare kʷ would be the reflex of one of Play's two allomorphs of the interrogative mood, which I think could serve to create the standalone /kʷ/ in Leaper even before reanalysis. The meaning would probably shift, and the other allomorph of Play's interrogative, tīs, could survive in Leaper with the original meaning.
It's fortunate for me that the Play morphemes happened be aligned along a spectrum of /a i u/ so they are easy for my English-speaking mind to remember. If it had been /a u i/ instead I would keep mixing them up.
Leaper's cognate of Play va ~ ve, a common suffix on morphemes which can in a few cases also stand alone, is simply w, which I may spell ʕʷ some of the time because that is it's pronunciation when at the beginning or end of a stressed syllable. Because of various processes of delabialization, this morpheme can actually go silent in some contexts. Thus, my plan is to analogize from silence to posit the existence of this morpheme in various places in a sentence, only surfacing in certain contexts, perhaps no more than once per clause. Then, in turn, because any consonant can precede a /w/, a whole new set of morphemes is unlocked by positing pairs with and without this /w/. So what does it mean? The meaning is pretty hard to pin down, and it may be said that it's semantically empty or very close to it. In Play, as I said, it almost never occurs alone. If I had to call it something I'd say that it translates both English th- and wh- in grammar morphemes.
But this means that there are now also three standalone vocalic mood suffixes, -a -i -o, corresponding to no original MRCA or Lava Bed morpheme. Here, they are on a spectrum; -a indicates strong belief, -i indicates a positive affirmation of a weak belief (roughly English "hopefully"), and -o indicates doubt. It's worth noting that while Leaper has five vowels /a e i o u/, only /a i o/ are the "system" vowels, corresponding mostly to Play /a i u/, whereas /e u/ in Leaper are usually secondary developments. This means that many things occur in sets of three, rarely in five.
The lost fourth mood is Play's cover-all potential mood, which could be said to enwrap the other three. Leaper could solve this by innovating a new suffix that would go after the /kʷ/ mood marker, since /kʷ/ is now a morpheme on its own, but I havent gotten to that yet. Also, I just noticed that a bare kʷ would be the reflex of one of Play's two allomorphs of the interrogative mood, which I think could serve to create the standalone /kʷ/ in Leaper even before reanalysis. The meaning would probably shift, and the other allomorph of Play's interrogative, tīs, could survive in Leaper with the original meaning.
It's fortunate for me that the Play morphemes happened be aligned along a spectrum of /a i u/ so they are easy for my English-speaking mind to remember. If it had been /a u i/ instead I would keep mixing them up.
Leaper's cognate of Play va ~ ve, a common suffix on morphemes which can in a few cases also stand alone, is simply w, which I may spell ʕʷ some of the time because that is it's pronunciation when at the beginning or end of a stressed syllable. Because of various processes of delabialization, this morpheme can actually go silent in some contexts. Thus, my plan is to analogize from silence to posit the existence of this morpheme in various places in a sentence, only surfacing in certain contexts, perhaps no more than once per clause. Then, in turn, because any consonant can precede a /w/, a whole new set of morphemes is unlocked by positing pairs with and without this /w/. So what does it mean? The meaning is pretty hard to pin down, and it may be said that it's semantically empty or very close to it. In Play, as I said, it almost never occurs alone. If I had to call it something I'd say that it translates both English th- and wh- in grammar morphemes.
Makapappi nauppakiba.
The wolf-sheep ate itself. (Play)
The wolf-sheep ate itself. (Play)
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Arayaz
- roman
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Re: Dreamlandic (and other non-Play) scratchpad
I really like this! Super creative.
Proud member of the myopic-trans-southerner-Viossa-girl-with-two-cats-who-joined-on-September-6th-2022 gang
2c2ef0 Areyaxi family Arskiilz Kahóra Abisj
my garbage Ɛĭ3
she/her
2c2ef0 Areyaxi family Arskiilz Kahóra Abisjmy garbage Ɛĭ3
she/her
Re: Dreamlandic (and other non-Play) scratchpad
Building the lexicon isnt a priority for me with Leaper, although I'll need to have some basic words. Here's an example of what the sound changes do to the bisyllabic parent language roots that in Play are mostly still bisyllabic:
gʷ "child; baby; female property"
ô "sword"
lă "soap"
pʷĭ "liquid soap"
ṡ "violence; to hurt"
ŋó "campsite"
It is not my intent to make Leaper a monosyllabic language; even with its ample phonology, there aren't enough possible word shapes to make a full vocabulary from monosyllables. This means that I will need to make a great many compounds. I am also considering retaining the classifier suffixes that Play uses sparingly, although aesthetically I dislike both the idea of having a two-syllable word with one "useless" syllable for the classifier suffix, and having a three-syllable word in a language like Leaper. So I'm undecided. At least one classifier suffix could be a syllabic consonant in its bare form, but I'm not big on that idea either.
The campsite word above is cognate to Play ŋūpia with the same meaning (indeed, Im just assuming no semshifts at all on most of these; if I change one side, it'll be Leaper and not Play). The root of this is ŋūp. In Play, the original paradigms were mostly kept intact, which means the B-stem is not predictable from the base form. In this case it is ŋuka- in Play. Whereas Leaper regularizes almost all of its words, so that the A-stem mostly predicts the B-stem (though still not the reverse). The B-stem is not used as often as it is in Play because even with the regularization a large number of B-stems fall together in words for which the A-stems are distinct.
gʷ "child; baby; female property"
ô "sword"
lă "soap"
pʷĭ "liquid soap"
ṡ "violence; to hurt"
ŋó "campsite"
It is not my intent to make Leaper a monosyllabic language; even with its ample phonology, there aren't enough possible word shapes to make a full vocabulary from monosyllables. This means that I will need to make a great many compounds. I am also considering retaining the classifier suffixes that Play uses sparingly, although aesthetically I dislike both the idea of having a two-syllable word with one "useless" syllable for the classifier suffix, and having a three-syllable word in a language like Leaper. So I'm undecided. At least one classifier suffix could be a syllabic consonant in its bare form, but I'm not big on that idea either.
The campsite word above is cognate to Play ŋūpia with the same meaning (indeed, Im just assuming no semshifts at all on most of these; if I change one side, it'll be Leaper and not Play). The root of this is ŋūp. In Play, the original paradigms were mostly kept intact, which means the B-stem is not predictable from the base form. In this case it is ŋuka- in Play. Whereas Leaper regularizes almost all of its words, so that the A-stem mostly predicts the B-stem (though still not the reverse). The B-stem is not used as often as it is in Play because even with the regularization a large number of B-stems fall together in words for which the A-stems are distinct.
Makapappi nauppakiba.
The wolf-sheep ate itself. (Play)
The wolf-sheep ate itself. (Play)
Re: Dreamlandic (and other non-Play) scratchpad
Thanks. I appreciate anyone who takes the time to read these posts.
_____________
Today I've written down an idea that's been floating in my mind for a while ... for how to make Dreamlandic even worse. This idea is to make it mandatory for most verbs to indicate the noun class of the patient, as in languages such as Andanese, to which Dreamlandic is distantly related. It's possible therefore that it will be a feature inherited from the parent language, although the means by which the patient noun class is marked is quite different in the two languages, so if inherited it may have disappeared in one branch while being replaced through mutual influence by an innovated process.
So for example, to say "i bathed the pig" in Dreamlandic, one must not only mention the pig but also mention that it is a large land animal:
re sē ere kīsi labori ne sepi.
I, with my hands and a soap/cloth, bathed the pig, an animal.
The part that means bathe is just /la/ ... it is so squished by all the function words that I'm considering pruning out all the monosyllabic content words and even a lot of the disyllabic ones because the speech tempo in this language will need to be so fast that they could hardly be heard otherwise.
So what is the point of all this? I mentioned that in Andanese, the same requirement to mark the patient's noun class is in effect, but I don't consider Andanese a hatelang. It's hard to explain, but in Andanese, marking the noun class of the patient helps narrow down the meaning of the verb. Both Andanese and Dreamlandic have very broad meanings for their verbs, and in Dreamlandic they are often simply words for arm and hand motions. Therefore it could mean something completely different if the object were of a different class. The idea, though, is that in Andanese the system works well, and in Dreamlandic it works horribly because the added information is so often unnecessary. Part of this is because in Andanese the patient's classifier prefix and the word for the patient itself are attached, whereas in Dreamlandic they are separated, and it's much easier to communicate information when two words come together in a sentence than when they are separated by a verb.
But at the same time, the system can't decay because the verb does gain some of its meaning from the patient agreement and the instrument word (in this case /sē ere/ "with (my) hands and a cloth/soap handheld object"), meaning that if those words were to be omitted, the bare verb la wouldn't communicate effectively what the speaker was doing. Like so many other verbs, it refers to a hand motion, most likely (though I havent decided yet) a rapid swishing back and forth, which would only come to mean "wipe, clean, bathe" when both the instrument and the target are appropriate.
Makapappi nauppakiba.
The wolf-sheep ate itself. (Play)
The wolf-sheep ate itself. (Play)