Kava
This article is mostly about the historical kingdom. For the present day Kava, see Nama#Kava.
Kava is the name of a kingdom in the far southeast of Nama. Pavbwa is the name of a city settled by Subumpamese and Andanese-type people during a time in which Nama did not have control of the area. Its etymology is similar to "Baeba Swamp" and indeed it is a mostly a swamp. But it was the capital of a very powerful nation, Kava, during its time. Its people called it "Lun" rather than Pavbwa; their descendants embraced Naman culture when they were eventually overhwlemed, and then later on, Poswob cutlure when Poswobs began taking over Nama. They existed as Kava for a short time, roughly 3125 to 3348.
Languages
- See Lenian languages for many languages.
See history for more languages.
Historically, Kava spoke a dialect of Paleo-Pabappa. This was sometimes erroneously considered a Subumpamese language because of its location. However, a different group of immigrants in the same area calling itself FILTER did indeed speak Subumpamese.
Grammar
Kava was isolated from the Gold language for most of its history, and therefore took most of its influence from the grammatically dissilimar Old Andanese language. This caused Kava to develop a very simple grammar, losing most of the Subumpamese suffixes, while gaining no new prefixes or infixes from Andanese. A new part of speech called an auxiliary verb or weak verb appeared, which carried the meaning of inflections and behaved like verbs except that they did not carry the classifier prefixes that full verbs did.
Some auxiliary verbs were derived from the Tapilula particles
- ŋò with; next to; near
- tò similar; to agree
- ŋà on top of
- hì member, dependent; underneath
- kè covering; standing over
- mə̀ overlapping; in front of
- gà in front of
- hà to be changed by
- hù to capture, get
- hʷò to see beauty, to cover
- nə̀ moving
- mò on top of
- pì supported by
- tà to push on
- là to pull on; to focus on, see clearly
History
- See here.
