Lesson 2b: Drink Me! Eat Me!, or Through the Lookingglass

Okay, so this is where 2b goes. It's probably more understandable after 2a than before.

You and I have a common feature in Washo, at least when "you" are the subject of my command. The imperative prefix g- behaves in the same way as the vowel-initial first person prefix l-; the prefix ge triggers vowel coloring. This is e-coloring (though it has nothing to do with computers), and therefore changes i to e Thus the command "drink!", from geíme? surfaces as géme', and the command "walk!go!", from geíye' surfaces as géye'. One would think that vowel coloring would provide sufficient complexity, but stems such as í'iw "to eat (something)" and í'is "to hold, take, bring", add a further twist, thanks to the glottal stop. The glottal stop is barely a consonant, a way station to oblivion, and does not have the strength to prevent the vowel coloring from contaminating both syllables. The imperatives of í'iw and í'is are gé'ew and gé?es, respectively.

There are two more things to note. The first is the propensity of common words (especially verbs) to acquire or keep linguistic peculiarities and a wide range of meaning. Thus it is no surprise that í'is has both vowel coloring and a weak consonant. The second, the difference between émlu and í'iw, shows the distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs. gémlu means "eat!", but does not demand a word or prefix to describe what food was eaten. gé'ew, on the other hand, requires a direct object, a description of what food was eaten. This blog will address how one says "eat the food!" in due time (a hint: it involves the noun démlu and the imperative gé'ew.