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 1a: Bed and Board, M'Lord

(A brief note before we start: if these posts seem short, they are baby steps to walking in the Washo language.)

Washo words are not allowed to begin with a vowel (and in Washo, the glottal stop qualifies as a consonant). It's just one of the quirks of the language - and you will learn of many quirks if you follow the siren song of The Tahoe Tongue. Many languages, however, have roots whose structures are at odds with the final structure of the word or phrase. If a Washo stem such as áŋal "house" or émlu "food" begins with a vowel, yet the final product may not, what's a speaker to do? The answer involves prefixation. Prefixation occurs when one grammatical element attaches itself to the front of the word root; an Latin example of this is the self-illustrating word "prefix", in which "pre" is a prefix.

So let us suppose that a Washo speaker sees a house (more likely a hogan, in the days before the coming of the White Man) and knows nothing else about it. The root for "house" or "to build is áŋal, but cannot be used by itself. The speaker would have to say dáŋal, using the prefix d-.

What if the speaker knows whose house it is? In the Washo Province of the Land of Grammar, there are only three persons: first (me), second (you), and third (that guy we're talking about). If the speaker wished to indicate his own house, he would say láŋal, "my house" or "our house". If the house in question were not his, but that of his companion, he would say máŋal, "your house". If the house belonged to subject of the conversation, the speaker would say ťáŋal, "his house", in which ť is a glottalized t. (I will defer to the excellent the pronunciation guide, with audio, at The Washo Project - http://washo.uchicago.edu/ ), This process is similar to the "m'lord" and "m'lady" pronunciation of "my lord" and "my lady", if one could also say "y'lord" and "s'lady".

Note that Washo does not care much about gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) or grammatical number (singular, dual, plural); thus ťáŋal can mean "his house", "her house", "their house", "his houses", "her houses", "their houses". There is a way of making things plural, but that lesson is far down the line, beyond Jacobsen.