Pabappa

This page presents the language as a grammar organized by subject. See Pabappa/scratchpad for older chronological updates. FOR NOW, ALL PAGES ARE SCRATCHPADS.

Pabappa is the daughter language of Play that remained in the original Play homeland around the capital city.

Pabappa is a Lava Bed language, like its sister Poswa, and its parent language Play. The grammar is noticeably simpler than in these other languages, but still retains the classic Lava Bed trait of using suffixes and infixes that can affect all parts of a word, even the beginning, hence "erupting" and molding all of the available space.

Unlike Poswa, Pabappa continues to make use of compounds.

Phonology

Consonants

The consonants are

Bilabials:    p  m  b  w
Coronals:     t  n  d  l  s
Dorsals:               r

The pronunciation of r varies widely according to the speaker and the place in the word, as it is the only dorsal consonant in the language and is thus very distinct. The l phoneme sometimes appears as IPA /j/ after a vowel. The other consonants have very little allophony.

Vowels

The vowel inventory is /a e i o u/, and this is the native Pabappa alphabet order as well.

When two vowels occur together, they are pronounced as a sequence, never as a diphthong. The only diphthongs are those involving a vowel followed by one of /l r/.

Nouns

Nouns have a (historically passive) object slot. This is derived from the B stem. These resemble BB compounds in Play, but with the extra cane in the middle.

Verbs

Most verbs belong to the U-verb class, cognate to Poswa's, but radically expanded in Pabappa. This derives from the instrumental case, which is a shared Poswa/Pabappa innovation derived from a Play plural infix.

One difference between the U-verbs in the two languages is that in Pabappa, they are derived directly from the verbal stem, whereas in Poswa, they are derived from a possessed form of the stem. Thus, in Poswa, the U-verbs mean "to use one's (own) X", but in Pabappa, they mean "to use an X". Nonetheless, the meanings of the U-verbs in both languages are primarily idiomatic and this difference in origin means little.

Object slot

LATE ADDITION (05:55, 3 November 2024 (PST)): it is possible that private verbs, which may be the same class as U-verbs or a subset of them, are in fact the ones that do not have an object slot.

U-verbs (and most other verbs) have an object slot after the stem, which can either be a single consonant (usually -p- for reflexive and -s- for reciprocal), a noun classifier word, or empty. If it is empty, then the /-u/ suffix directly abuts the stem of the verb, and may cause stem changes.

Importantly, any verb with an object slot uses an A-stem, not the B-stem that generates the citation form. This A-stem can be very different from the B-stem, as they are both often inherited from Play with no analogy, and even in Play they were often quite different. Sound changes often drove them even further apart. This means also that some verbs collide in the A-stem but not in the B-stem, or vice versa. This means that there are verbs that can only be used transitively, or only intransitively, because in the other "voice" they collid with some other verb. However, Pabappa nonetheless has much analogy, and many A-stems were rebuilt after their B-stem. (Note also the conditional sound changes of /k š/ > /p s/ effectively undid Play's sound changes.)

The object slot construction is descended from Play's AB compounds. In Play, these behaved like head-initial noun compounds, rare at the time, and had to be capped with a further suffix that reflected the noun classifier of the head (not the object), thus turning the word back into a head-final compound as was the standard for the Play language. In Pabappa, they behave as verbs and the subject noun classifiers have been lost; instead, Pabappa marks the noun class of the object using what was once a standalone word of an open class but has now evolved into a closed-class infix.

The object slot marks the classifier of the object, and in some cases may communicate the action well enough by itself that the object of the sentence can be omitted. This is comparable to the English object pronoun it, except that in Pabappa there are a few dozen such morphemes corresponding to the various noun classes. This enables the object to be omitted even from some sentences in which the speaker has not recently mentioned it. Nonetheless, the object is most often named explicitly in the sentence and marked as such despite the presence of the object classifier infix on the verb.

These object classifiers could also be called verb classifiers, but most Lava Bed languages with verb classifiers have them as prefixes before the verb, priming the listener by giving contextual information before the verb is heard.

Secundative

The objects can include animates. It is possible that they will be linmuted, like in Play, to the "closest" object only, not the object that is the patient. BUT IT IS MORE LIKELY THESE OBJECTS REFER TO THE PATIENT OF THE ACTION, NOT THE INSTRUMENT, BECAUSE THEY INCLUDE PEOPLE, AND EVEN INCLUDE THE 1ST AND 2ND PERSON MARKERS.

with passive verbs

this an lead to odd situations such as -t- after passive just by itself meaning "by a hammer/saw" (heavy toolk) because it is from -nt-.

this will be an agreement morpheme. in fact perhaps ALL passive verbs should agree ith noun class of subj

if the -p is lost for 1st person passives, they would behave as actives from then on and the 1ps PAT pronoun would distinguish.

this could also mean that Play -m plsuy any word means "tree branch" wannopa etc

if the -nopa sux is detached and copied to the sub

Aspect

09:02, 21 May 2023 (PDT)

Pabappa "freezes out" Play's open-class Lava Bed aspect system by having just a few aspects corresponding to traditional grammatical aspect categories. Play had been able to use any verb as an aspect marker, similar to English constructions like "eat to exhaustion". Poswa retains this as well.

There may be irregular shortening from -s- insertion before nasals, e.g. žam > am but žasm > žamm > zm > m.

Aspwct slots

There are probably at least three aspect slots on every verb, but zero morphs are allowed, "like in a normal language". It is possible that all aspect markers are preceded by -a- since the tenses are marked by /i/ and /u/. This would be from Play /Za/, which would reflex to /a/ only some of the time, but enough to analogize from.

• Slot 12: accepts at least -ra- "do many at once; a lot; repeat/intermit" and another one meaning repeated over time (study>learn)

1. a, a zero morph, but appars only when other slots are filled (at least one)
2. ra many atsonce/intermit/rpt/alot
3. ta unknown
4. pta unknown

These can be analyzed as consonants + /a/.

• Slot 24: has 4 forms to do with success&difficulty. probably animate agents only, and there may be a morpheme that just indicates inanimacy rather than using a zero morph for it

1. a zero morph (see above, /aa/ > /a/)
2. mpa attemp, try
3. psa try unsucc AGREEMENT MORPH
4. pa ~ ba do with difficulty but succeed
5. nsa try unsucc AGREEMENT MORPH (mp + ps)
6. pta involuntary (implies success)

• Slot 36: two statives and a cess/emph-perefcet

1. ma stative aspect. possibly cannot occur alone
2. ptama stative aspect. possibly implies involuntary action
3. ri unknown (mayber wrong slot)
4. mi cessative, emph perf ("do to completion", not "stop"). possibly inherently past tense due to -i

gender

the inherited Play gender ystsem only gives words for children: boy, girl, child, people.

adults use dunamic gender (adjs)

copula

might use transitive copula with object slots