Thursday, July 2, 2015

Detail #179: Connegative verbs and names

Some Uralic languages have a set of verb forms called 'connegatives'. Generally speaking, these languages also have a negative auxiliary (much like English "don't/doesn't", but inflecting for more persons and not necessarily taking the infinitive). In Finnish, the connegative verbs are identical to other verb forms, mostly: the connegative present verb is identical to the singular imperative:

mene! (go!)
ei mene (doesn't go)
menee (goes)
menen (I go)
en mene (I don't go)

The past tense is formed by using the past participle instead: 

saapunut mies (the man who (has) arrived)
mies ei saapunut (the man did not arrive)
mies saapui (the man arrived)
mies on saapunut (the man has arrived (literally "is arrived")
et saapunut (you didn't arrive)
saavuit (you arrived)
olet saapunut (you have arrived)
et ole saapunut (you have not arrived)

In most of the Uralic languages with such a negative auxiliary, the imperative is formed by a suppletive negative auxiliary. In Finnish, it is älä/älkää(/älkäämme/älköön/älkööt)(the forms in parenthesis are somewhat unusual, 1pl, 3pl, 3sg). In the second person singular , the connegative is identical to the regular imperative, again.

Älä mene! (Don't go)
However, with plurals and the third person singular, it is a unique form:
älkää menkö (don't y'all go!)
älköön tulko (don't he come! as an optativey thing)
Finally, the passive has a connegative that simply removes part of the passive suffix -tAAn (present), -tiin (past) and obtains -dA (or -tA) (present passive connegative, sometimes identical with the infinitive), -tU (past, also the past passive participle).
I am not all that sure how other Uralic languages deal with this, but let's go and imagine a system slightly different from that of Finnish. We posit an explicit set of forms - connegative imperative, connegative past and connegative present (possibly some TAM's connegative forms are constructed, however, by reusing other forms, much like how Finnish reuses the imperative and the past active participle here). Now, we further add these restrictions: these forms only ever appear as part of the verbal complex with negative particles and they originate with deverbal forms of some kind (possibly having some formerly case morphology on them).

So, we suddenly have a set of almost-nouns, that when they are used indicate negation. This could be used for something. Let's be weird and use them for personal names! 

Fear.CNEG-IMPER-PLUR "(do not, ye all) fear"
Fall.CNEG-PRES "(does not) fall"
Conquer.CNEG- PASS "(un)conquered"
Deceive.CNEG-PRES-SG "(does not) deceive"
Suffer*.CNEG-PRES-SG "(does not) suffer"
Surrender.CNEG-IMPER-PLUR "(do not, ye all) surrender"

*as in "to suffer a fool", or such.
This might be a pretty unusual naming scheme, I figure.

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