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<html><head><title>Grammatical terms in Kebreni</title></head>
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<p>Posted by <b><!--poster-->Philip Newton</b>
on <!--date-->5:59 8/13/01
<p>In reply to: (none)
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<p>
Grammatical terms in Verdurian appear to be pretty complete, but I was
wondering what Kebreni call their verb inflections.
<p>My first guess was that they would have words for "benefactive", "polite",
"subordinate", and so on, but a little thought led me to a different system.
Since their verb inflections depend to a great extent on changing vowels and
moving them around while keeping the basic consonantal structure intact
(except for possible voicing and devoicing), I can imagine that they might
take a similar approach to Arabic.
<p>In that language, I am told, grammarians take the verb f-`-l (or f-3-l,
f-?-l; fa-`ayn-lam) "to do" (dictionary form fa`ala) and use its forms as
the name of the corresponding general verb form. So, for example, "taktabi"
would be the "taf`ali" of k-t-b (the example here is quoted from memory and
may be incorrect).
<p>The corresponding verb in Kebreni would be "tasu" since that means "to do";
however, this has a suppletive form "soru" for the polite forms, making it
slightly less suitable (since "suro" does not correspond very well
morphologically to, say, "kurina").
<p>Two possible "solutions" that come to mind are (a) to inflect "tasu"
"irregularly" (actually, regularly) when it is used to construct names of
grammatical forms (so the "perfective polite" form would be called the
"turisa" form despite the fact that the "turisa" form of "tasu" is not
"turisa" but "suro"), or (b) to pick a different verb (preferably, IMO, one
ending in -Cu rather than -uCy and having the form CVCu rather than, say,
CVCCu or CVVCu). A couple of possibilities are zaru "exist, be there", diru
"work", nizu "speak", nuitsu "think", and kanu "see". (I presume "baku" is
not a good choice for the paradigmatical verb [grin].) Which one was
actually chosen depends, I suppose, on the philosophy of Kebreni
grammarians.
<p>Under this approach, it would be a bit more difficult to talk about, say,
the benefactive form in the absolute since there is no single word for
"benefactive", only forms for "benefactive imperfective, benefactive
perfective, benefactive volitional polite perfective" etc. But it might be
sufficient, and would seem more natural.
<p>"The volitional is formed by ..." would then probably be said as something
like "The *adesu* form is formed from the *tasu* by ..." even though it can
also be formed from the benefactive or *tesi* form: tasu - tesi - edesi, but
"edesi" is also a kind of "adesu", in a way, since both are volitionals.
<p>Could you ask your sources what method they use natively to describe their
grammar?
<p>And a related question: have you any idea what Kebreni call parts of speech?
I could imagine descriptive forms (such as are used sometimes in German
grammars: "main word" = noun, "do word" = verb, "how word" or
"quality/attribute/property word" [Eigenschaftswort] = adjective) or
borrowings from Cadhinor if they don't have their own words.
<p>Cheers,
<br>Philip
<hr><i>Mark responds:
<p>Heh... in the moment between seeing the subject line and reading your
posting, I thought about the Arabic system, which is wonderfully clever.
It's much better than having to refer to (say) <b>chantait</b> as the "third person singular past imperfect indicative."
<p>The verb I'd choose is <b>nizu</b> 'to say'. So you can name all the
forms by running <a href="http://shavian.org/verdurian/kebverb.cgi">Philip's verb conjugator</a>.
<p>I'll get back to you on the other grammatical terms.</i>
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