Khulls verbs

Khulls verbs are broadly similar to Poswa's.

Structure of verbs

NOTE, THIS PAGE CONTAINS ONLY INTRANSITIVE VERBS FOR THE TIME BEING BECAUSE THE TRANSITIVES ARE *NOT* SIMILAR TO POSWA. POSWA'S TRANSITIVE VERBS ARE ACTUALLY DERIVED FROM A VERBAL AUXILIARY THAT PUMMELED SO DEEP INTO THE VERB THAT IT CAME TO BE SEEN AS PART OF IT.

Strucuture of verbal stems

Most verbs end in vowels. This is because in the Tapilula language, all words ended in vowels and verbs were formed by moving the stress to the final syllable. In the Gold language, some unstressed vowels were dropped, but since all verb roots were stressed on their final syllable, no verb would ever come to end in a consonant. Khulls, however, has exceptions to this, because some verbs have come to end in consonants. These are of two types:

• Verbs that formerly ended in a stressed schwa vowel /ə/. In Khulls, stress drifted away from the schwa early on, and later the schwa was dropped entirely, usually leaving behind a residue of labialization on the preceding consonant. An example of this is ḳʷahʷ "to sleep in a bed".

• Verbs that formerly ended in a stressed syllabic consonant, which was considered a vowel at the time. Khulls does not consider these to be vowels and they cannot carry stress except in a word containing no vowels. This category contains only words ending with nasals, as the other syllabic consonants did not exist in the Gold language.

Because of the process above, verbs also cannot end in high-tone long vowels; that is, the ā and á tones never appear at the end of a verbal stem.

Tense and person markers

The verbal endings are always unstressed and the stress migrates to the last syllable of the stem. The gender marker is inserted before the vowel.

INTRANSITIVE VERBS

person	past	pres	fut	hab	imp1	imp2	other	Comments
1st	—	ō	ūm	o	ūṅṭ
2nd	ĕ	ē	ṁ	i	ṅṭ
3rd	ī	ā	ōm	a	ōṅṭ

Use of gender markers

Khulls retains the use of the otherwise mostly obsolete consonantal gender markers inherited from the Gold language. For example, with the verb kʷî "to dream", one can say

Šŭpe kʷînī.

Suphoi (a girl's name) dreamt.

Baṭà kʷîrī.

Batak (a boy's name) dreamt.

Use of gender markers with verb stems ending in consonants

They seomtimes mingle with the consonants at the end of verbs, with each consonant affecting the other. For example, with the verb lixʷ "to talk", one can form sentences like

Ŏma limpʷī.

The woman talked.

Lăxi likʷī.

The man talked.

Note that the Roman orthography the verbs above implies that the verbs are accented on its ending rather than the stem; this is not true, and results from a convention of not adding accents to roots which are spelled without them in bare form.

Transitivity

Six infixes mark the object of the verb.

-aʕ- himself; themselves (each acting on himself)
-al- himself and someone else (each acting on himself)
-ey- some other people (acting on each one individually)
-am- themselves; each other
-an- themselves and some other people
-im- some other people

note, this might not be true. '-ey-' is cog to Poswa's passive former, which means its meaning here is nearly the opposite of what it should be.

Voice

The passive voice is marked by -ik-, and the mediopassive is marked by -ak-.

Aspect

Imperfect aspect is marked by an infixed syllabic -ṁ-. Frequentative is marked by an infixed syllabic -ṅ-.