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.

Lesson 2a: A Tisket, A Tasket, Tie the Baby in a Basket

I missed a week: mea maxima culpa.

It is said that, in English, you can verb any noun; in Washo the boundary between nouns and verbs is a vague as the boundary of Saudi Arabia and Oman in the Rub al-Khali. émlu, for example, is the stem for "food" and (one of the words for) "to eat" The most basic form of the verb (and, perhaps more importantly for a teaching text, the most likely form to use a bare stem) is the imperative, the Verb Which Commands. Examples in English include "go away!" and "tell me the truth!".

Washo sound rules (phonotactics) apply to verbs as well as nouns, so the verb ásaw "to laugh" or ábıŋ "to tie the baby in the basket" cannot remain constantly consonant-less. The imperative prefix in Washo is g-. The imperatives, therefore, for ásaw, ábıŋ, émlu, élšım "to sleep", and émc'i "to wake up" are gásaw, gábıŋ, gémlu, gélšım, and gémc'i.

There are two more verbs which show other peculiarities. The verb álŋ "to lick" uses the prefix g- to produce gálŋ. This doesn't look like a problem, but a different Washo rule complicates matters. Washo syllables can end in only one consonant, and gálŋ has two. What is a speaker to do, faced with this dilemma? Meet Anna Ptyxis, daughter of Epenthesis. In the case of the Washo language, anaptyxis (the insertion of vowel between two consonants to make pronunciation easier) places a ı between the l and the ŋ to produce gálıŋ. At this point, it is important to note that the presence of ı between consonants is not necessarily a sign of anaptyxis: the verb "to tie the baby in the basket" is ábıŋ, not ábŋ.

The other peculiar verb is á:hu, which means "to stand", but only in the plural. This may seem strange, if you remember that plurality is optional in Washo. Unfortunately, the freedom to ignore plurality in nouns and verbs does not extend to verbs where the verb itself contains the notion of plural or singular. gá:hu means "y'all stand"; if you want to order one person to stand, that's a different verb. It's a bit like learning that, in English, you say "I go" (present) but "I went" (past); a challenge, but a feature which give the language its unique flavor.

Lesson 1c: Blankets and Bones

It's Labor Day, but there's one final twist on the prefixes for the summer. The prefixes m-, ť-, and d- are as well behaved as one could wish, but the prefix l-, in a fitting display of egotism, differs. The true form of the first person prefix is not l-, but le-. This phenomenon is known as vowel coloring. Vowel coloring changes an adjacent vowel, but sometimes does not otherwise betray its presence. In this case, the vowel coloring of le- is weak, and easily overwhelmed by all vowels except for i. Unlike the promise in the Gospel, the le- prefix does change an iota of the (linguistic) law; an i preceded by the le- prefix becomes e. Thus íyeš becomes léyeš "my daughter-in-law", ipi? becomes lépi? "my blanket", í:bu changes to lé:bu, and í:bi? is transformed into lé:bi?. If you can keep those last three straight without practice, you're doing better than I did.

Have a good weekend!