Languary 4-23

[rix_scaedu]

This was meant to be my Day 4 post but things obviously took a lot longer to work out and explain than I expected. Also the body insists on sleeping, very inconvenient of it.

Now there is someone other than ourselves to talk to, we can ask questions for someone else to answer. For that we need some form of interrogative.

One of the ways ‘Allspeak’ handles this is by adding the prefix ‘cho /tʃɒ/ to the thing being asked about. Thus you have:

chohay – Who am I?

chotuy – Who are you? (This could, of course, be chotay or chotoy.)

If you add the prefix to any of the reflexive pronouns you get the form that translates as:

chotuyertuy – Who is this?

‘Allspeak’ has two words for place. These are:

nown – meaning a precise place that can be specified exactly, e.g. using map co-ordinates; and

goyl - meaning locality, area, or region

Taking into account these shadings of meaning, we have:

chonown and chogoyl - where?

chonownnown and chogoylgoyl – Where is this (place)?

chonown hay and chogoyl hay – Where am I?

‘Allspeak’ also has two general words that would be translated into English as ‘what?’ These are:

choszarp – what thing?

chocared – what action?

To be more specific, you would use a more specific noun or verb prefixed by cho-.

That specific noun can be an owned thing, in which case, it takes the genitive. This is formed by adding a suffix of the first and last letters of the pronoun appropriate to the owner/s of the item for singular owners and the first and the last two letters of the pronoun for plural owners. Thus:

nownhm – my place;

nowntm – your place;

goylhym – our area; and

chonowntm – where is your place?

To ask someone to specify what one of a certain number of options is either relevant or their choice, the word chodek is used, dek being the definite article. When it is known that the answer will be, or is likely to be, multiple options then chonum is used with num being a stem used in a number of words meaning a count of things.

To ask why, is to ask for the reason and thus chomer /tʃɒmɜ/, meaning literally ‘for what reason?’ is the correct usage for such questions. The colloquial form choguydszear /tʃɒgaɪʒıə/ means ‘for what necessity?’ and implies sarcasm plus a level of negative feeling towards the matter being asked about.

When asking about the method or means by which something occurred, the interrogative used is choðast, ‘by what means?’ Thus:

choðast tarkayowk – How did you stop?

But also

tarkayowk choðast – How did you stop?

The word order, particularly in a simple sentence like this, depends on what is most important to the speaker. With a question, it is often that the sentence is a question that requires an answer so the interrogative goes first. In the second example, the speaker is probably more interested in the stopping than the method of doing so, but is running the risk of having the question assumed to be rhetorical.

The final set of common interrogatives are greetings, the equivalents of the English, “How are you?” and “How’s things?” Both are rendered in ‘Allspeak’ using words taken bodily from Setsunya religious practice, that faith group having been wide spread and influential in the Norma Arm where most of the ‘Allspeak’ users’ progenitors originated. They are:

choshrivanyatm – How are you?, literally ‘how is your being?’ Shrivanya is a Setsunyan concept of the whole person and their physical, mental, spiritual and psychic aspects; and

chohamadrarmatm – How is your world? Hamadrarma is another Setsunyan concept, this one being of a person’s perceived and experienced world, the universe of which they are most truly the centre.