Monday, April 13, 2015

Dairwueh: Imperatives, Participles and Gerunds

Previously, the finite verb has been detailed in this post. In it, I referred to a future post detailing the non-finite verbs of Dairwueh as well as its imperative.

For verbs that are bisyllabic or longer, the imperative is identical to the IIIsg form. For monosyllabic verb stems, it generally has a short syllabic core. Thus taan: tan ('say'), don: don ('look). A few verbs have a vowel change involved - reeb: rib (tear), skoon: sken (run), faarg:ferg ('shut up'). In the singular, thus, some verbs conflate the imperative and the IIIsg, while some other verbs conflate the IIIsg and IIIsg2,but distinguish the imperative from the IIIsg. In the plural, the IIIsg form gets an -u suffix, so tanu, donu, reebu, skoonu, faargu.

The plural is sometimes also used to address the 1st person plural, and can then take an explicit subject pronoun.

Dairwueh has a small set of participles. A passive irrealis participle, negative and affirmative present and past active participles, and negative passive participles.

active
affirmative
present -un
past -ar
irrealis -umuš
negative
present -šun
past -eyš
passive
affirmative -šəŋ
negative e-___-šor
irrealis
 e-___-šis
 They tend to show less case morphology than other nouns, and conflate, for instance, accusative and nominative quite widely. The locative-instrumental can also be omitted quite freely. In fact, the accusative and locative-instrumental are only used as distinct case forms on them when they are used as designations of professions, e.g. partetun = baker, 'baking'. For use as a gerund, they normally take neuter morphology, and thus affix -e in the nominative, -e in the accusative, and so on.
The irrealis is basically an active form of '-able', i.e. someone who can do a thing. Passive irrealis likewise mainly signifies '-able'. 

Case congruence is somewhat simplified compared to other adjectives - essentially, when used as adjectival attributes they distinguish nominative from 'everything else' (except with neuters, where it's nominative-accusative from everything else). When used as complements, they behave as described above - conflating cases quite strongly (but dative and genitive are in fact distinguished).

The genitive is partially worth mentioning separately, as a participle as an adverb often is marked by that case if it pertains to the opinion of the speaker or if the speaker wants to attract attention to it.

The affirmative passive participle also combines with adjectives to form adjectives meaning 'who has been forced or turned into X (without voluntariness)'. Further, it is used to form ordinals from the cardinal numbers.

The present negative active participle also can go on 'integral parts' to mark their being missing, i.e.
sarišun 'handless' (or rather 'one-handed', lacking both hands would be sartašun)
kolšun 'legless' (as above, with koldašun for entirely legless)
pulšun 'hairless'
-eyš is only used in a similar construction for just a few particular nouns; nartereyš is a word signifying a man that now has reached adolescence. 'previously beardless' is its literal translation.



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