"In the hand" signifies different things in Ŋʒädär when compared to what it signifies in Sargaĺk and Ćwarmin. This is not all that surprising with Sargaĺk, where 'hand', knuk originates in an earlier word *knəkw, 'reach'. Knuk is a masculine noun, but we find an exception in the locatives: a singular hand takes the feminine locative marker, thus knukrut: in the hand, knukru: under manual control . The masculine locative gives a more general meaning of 'within (close) reach'.
Other non-related languages in the region have a similar 'wide' meaning for their words for hands. It seems early ĆŊ had a similar situation that Ćwarmin also conserves. Thus the word vilke (*xvülk'ö), hand, in the local cases in Ćwarmin too signifies 'reach, holding with a tool' in the singular, actual grasp in the paucal*, and actual grasps in the plural. The ablative lacks a distinction between paucals and plurals, and the semantics-to-morphology interface here gets slightly odd: the other forms' paucal maps to the ablative singular.
The definite and specific also merge in the ablative cases. Thus, we get a matrix along these lines, with G for physical grip, actual hands, W for wider reach and a suffixed s for singular, p for plural in parts where there may be ambiguity as to how the number is parsed.
Notice below that the order of "lat loc abl" is inverted for plural, in order to enable merging pc abl and pl abl.
sg pc pl lat loc abl lat loc abl loc lat indef W W W Wps Wps Wps Wp Wp spec W W W Gp Gp Gp G G def G G G G G
Plural for wider reach signifies 'many wider reaches', i.e. many people's separate reaches.
In Ŋʒädär, xülk'i is very concrete: a thing in the hands is physically located in the palms, or between the two palms being held together.
Dagurib goes further than Ćwarmin though, and extends 'hand' all the way to even very indirect grasping, such as 'in a vessel I control' or 'in a trap I have set'.
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