Saturday, June 21, 2014

Barxaw: Register, lexical intensification and comparatives

In Barxaw, my isolating conlang, intensity of verbs and adjectives is lexically coded - thus, running, running fast and running slow are separate lexemes, as are speaking, shouting and screaming. We notice from the second English tuplet that this is not unusual in English either.

In Barxaw, however, many such lexemes form pretty long hierarchies:

to know (in the sense of 'to have knowledge'), to be able to:
sep < ìpe < máw < nòtè < ram < léc < kudò

It turns out sep is the lowest in most registers. However, in slightly formal registers, ipe is the lowest, and in some ram is the lowest. In the case of {sep, ... kudò}, the higher the register, the more 'inflation' there is to the value of the verb (or adjective or even some nouns). {sep, ... kudo} is thus a verb set that decreases in value - in Barxaw, this is known as pék èn da màt ús ús - the words that shrink. (pék = word, èn = plural + class marker, da = plural pronoun for that class, màt ≃ do, ús ús = shrink, literally "small small")

An example of pék èn da màt o ko - words that grow (o, ko = big, the k in ko comes from a morphophonological thing where o ends in a 'lost consonant' that reappears in hiatus) - is "need"
wan - témì - nuh - pò' - síg - ŋím
Thus pò is the usual 'baseline' intensity, but in higher registers, nuh, then témì, then wan replace it, and pò becomes increasingly intense.

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