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| *The likely cognate of Poswa '''pib''' "to pick fruit; sample, example, specimen" in Khulls is '''pʷ''' and in proto-Moonshine '''p'''. | | *The likely cognate of Poswa '''pib''' "to pick fruit; sample, example, specimen" in Khulls is '''pʷ''' and in proto-Moonshine '''p'''. |
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| ===="U verbs"====
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| Poswa could use verb affixes such as '''-mpibabo''' "I use my arm", and give them widely divergent semantic definitions. For example the /mp/ comes from a word meaning thorn, which followed the semantic path
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| :thorn ---> pointed object ---> elbow ---> arm
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| And then stayed with the meaning "arm" because that was the most useful.
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| All U verbs use bisyllabic forms for the intransitives, and therefore trisyllabic forms for the transitives. These morphemes are '''-ibo -ube -oba''' for the ordinary verbs' ''-o -e -a''. Thus it is not a simple infix; it is conjugated.
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| ''NOTE: I came up with this idea after 4 months of not working on Poswa, however, so I may be overlooking a reason why I didnt try this before.''
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| These are called U-stem verbs or U verbs because in [[babakiam|Play]] the stems typically ended with /u/ or /ū/. They are bipersonal verbs, but both person markers must be the same. Thus, forms like ''*-ubo -obe -iba'' do not occur even though diachronically they would be just as legitimate as the forms that do occur.<ref>Though this leaves open the question of how one would express the literal meaning corrsponding to "i used your key"m, etc. Perhaps they would simply need to be expressed with individual words.</ref>
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| If they exist, they would be theoretically an open class, since the derivation of each U affix from a given content word is formulaic and cannot produce an ungrammatical form. However, many forms would collide, and it is likely that only a small number of such forms would be used outside of poetry and perhaps some specialized fields. (For example, the same morpheme that for humans could mean "by arm" could for some animals mean "by claw" since the original morpheme is in fact a word for thorn.)
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| Most U morphemes would be short ones, such as '''-š-''' "by key", which could take either a literal use (e.g. opening a door) or a metaphorical one (performing an action that others cannot do).
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| Some further potential examples, with generous translations:
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| ;INTRANSITIVES
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| :'''Tampišibi.'''
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| ::I drank wine (because I can).
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| :'''Lappotavibi.'''
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| ::I fell down. (By accident; this derives from ''tane'' "rump, tail" and thus means literally "i fell down with my bottom")
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| :'''Tipopožibi.'''
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| ::I traveled by animal. (/re/ "animal for riding" ---> /rož/ > /ož/) If this verb came into common use it could ''theoretically'' contract to /tipʷp-/ through regular syncope, but note that there are no other examples<sup>that i can remember</sup> of this contraction in the language.
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| ::If the affix "by animal" gets grammaticalized, it could shift its meaning widely as have the others, and
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| These are all etymologically repetitious, and could be replaced by "normal" forms with the shorter verb suffix, since the U form occupies one extra syllable while adding no new meaning. Thus the entire category of U verbs survives through idiomatic use only.
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| == Subumpam == | | == Subumpam == |
