A number of lexical complications in Tatediem

Tatediem has a relatively large gender system - obviously due to its vague Bantu influences. There are two genders that otherwise do act a lot like your average genders, and indeed most of the words in them are fully unremarkable as far as this particular thing goes. These two genders have, however, a number of words that have near-synonyms in both.

Examples:

kucende - gift (from the perspective of the giver)

ŋwucende - gift (from the perspective of the receiver)

kusunne - obligation (from the perspective of the person who is expected to perform the obligation)

ŋwusunne -  obligation (from the perspective of the person or group or so on who is expected to benefit from the obligation)

kurutki - assistance (from the perspective of the one giving the assistance)

ŋwurutki - assistance ( from the perspective of the recipient)

For a few words, the lexemes are not related, yet the same relation is definitely there:

kusatwis -  fatherhood (from the point of view of a father)

ŋwurehmuc - fatherhood (from the point of view of the offspring)

A number of family terms also come in two versions, although many family terms also have regular masculine or feminine versions, sometimes not lexically related at all.

kutali - uncle

ŋwutali - nephew

kusami - sister

ŋwusami - the brother or sister of a sister

These two genders also have unique congruence classes for possessed reference on verbs:

-kulo[se|ke|ne|ŋe|swi|kwi|nwi|ŋwi]- (basically 'the thing of this gender of mine|yours|his|her|ours|yours|theirs')

 -ŋwulo[se|ke|ne|ŋe|swi|kwi|nwi|ŋwi]- 

For object congruence, the prefix is

-hul-, -gul-.

Some dialects permit using the same [se|ke...] morphemes in combination with those two, but most do not. For most dialects, the owner of -hul- or -gul- is instead market in a variety of periphrastic ways. Finally, oftentimes further references to humans first referred to by nouns in these genders agree with the 'natural' gender, unless a very strong emphasis is placed on the type of relation.

 And here the  complication appears: -kulo- and -ŋwulo- both can refer to the same noun, if nouns that have 'siblings' of this kind are present in the sentence. In that case, a subtle shift in meaning may appear, e.g. the obligation now shifts from x's obligation to do something to y's privilege of receiving the benefits from that obligation, or the challenges and rewards of being a father to the perception of the father that the offspring has.

Detail #30: Two ideas for lexical derivation

Having perfective aspect morphology derive historically from a definite object marker is a bit been-there/done-that as far as ideas in this blog goes. However, aspect morphology can be interesting in other ways.

The detail I like here is the idea of having verbs along the line of arrive formed from the preposition one would use to express movement to the place being the object of the arrival, and a perfective morpheme. However, these would then grammaticalize into just average verbs, and maybe use a separate perfective morpheme to mark actual perfectiveness, alternatively lack imperfective forms.

Another thing I've been thinking of (and which could be interesting to combine with the previous idea) is object-type markers. These would mark perfective aspect, but the marker is semantically determined by the kind of action or kind of object involved:

ŋei - intransitive verb (only occurs with normally transitive ones), (also maybe some types of objects under some restrictions - non-kinetic non-... action)
ga - human object, also marks indirect object of bivalent verb (and then isn't restricted to perfective verbs)
den - liquid or very soft object (up to dough-type consistency), verbs such as pour, ...
toz - mass object
iŋk - object of ingestion or consumption
sek - structured object, collective object
sim - object of transaction
...

Now, these could maybe combine with adpositions too to form verbs:
in + iŋk = swallow
in + den = fill
out + toz = eject
out + den = ejaculate
out + sim = have sold at too low a price
at + sek = to arrange
in + ga = to have intercourse with, to marry?

Note that they would not be compounds, but separate words that together form phrasal verbs of some kind.