Pabappa

This page presents the language as a grammar organized by subject. See Pabappa/scratchpad for chronological updates.

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/.

Verbs

Most verbs belong to the U-verb class, cognate to Poswa's, but radically expanded in Pabappa.

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.

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.