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.