Early Bokisig

## **Phonology**

Alignment: **NOM-ACC**

Early Bokisig was the language spoken by the people of the Bokisig Confederation, and prescursor to Classical Bokisig; it was an SOV language using
nominative-accusative alignment, with an asymmetric case system, split between
animate and inanimate nouns, based on postpositions and suffixes. The verbal system heavily relied on converbs, which used switch-reference marking.

### **Nouns**

#### **Grammatical number**

While Early Bokisig nouns have no grammatical gender, there has been the fairly recent development of forming inflected plurals by suffixing different collective nouns (according to semantic criteria) to nouns to make various differentiations in grammatical number.

Before this development, plurals
were formed by reduplication of the first syllable, dropping the syllable coda, if any; this is no longer productive. In Early Bokisig, the reduplicated forms that are
still used fall into one of two categories:

a)   The
reduplicated form may have acquired a new meaning – some examples below:

b)   The
reduplicated form is used as plural, e.g.:

/ɣuɣ/ = “eye”; /ɣu.ɣuɣ/ = “eyes”

/su/ = “place”; /susu/ = “places”

The innovative and productive number
suffixes are listed in the table below:

Inserting “mɛka(hɛ)” (= “full”) between the root and the plural suffix derived from a collective word is a way to nominally
express “the full collection of”, i.e. “all”:

  priest-full-PL

“All priests have beards”:

An adverbial way of expressing the same thing would be:

  priest-PL

“Priests all have beards”

#### **Cases**

Early Bokisig was an SOV language using
nominative-accusative alignment, but without morphological marking of the
accusative (nor the nominative case). Its case system was asymmetric to an
extraordinary degree, split between animate and inanimate nouns.

Nouns take the following case suffixes:

A further important restriction is that only animate nouns can act as agent; inanimate are used with the
instrumental postposition "-*du*", plus either an animate agent or the dummy agent "kiku”, as illustrated by the following examples:

  apple-INSTR

**“Somebody broke the window of our house with an apple.”**

This strategy, employing an
unnamed dummy agent, here translated as “somebody”, is always used if an
inanimate noun is to act as semantic agent. The example also illustrates that
locative cases, primarily LOC, but also ABL, are used to express possessive relationships
involving inanimate possessors.

#### **Negation suffix**

In addition to the verbal negation, nouns may be followed by the negative postposition “-*sɛ*” to
indicate the scope of negation in more detail.

  water-INSTR
 AGENT’

**"It wasn't water that killed my friend"**

### **Pronouns**

#### **Personal pronouns**

  2SG
  3SG ANIM
 3SG INAM
  1PL INC
  1pl EXC
  2PL
  3PL ANIM
 3PL INAM
 ʔeʔe\*

\*Inanimate third person pronouns suffix “du” if they refer to an agent.

Examples:

  DEM

"That language isn’t difficult, let’s study together!"

### **Copulas**

  3SG.ANIM

**He is a fisherman.**

*“kun” is the copula for “noun = noun” constructions; personal pronouns are frequently dropped.*

  3SG.ANIM

**S/he is strong.**

*Stative*
verbs are used for predicative adjectives

  3SG.ANIM

**He is my husband.**

*This*
uses the same construction as the “fisherman” example above.

  3SG.ANIM

**He is in my house.**

Alocative verb is employed here – that is, a stative verb that expresses the
location “at / inside / near”, with the location as direct object.

### **Verbs**

#### **Verb types**

All Early Bokisig verbs (including the verb-like adjectives) are derived from a combination of a noun and a suffixed dummy verb or copula:

#### **Negation**

The general form of negation is
to add the negative particle “*sɛ*” in front of the
verb. In addition to this verbal negation, nouns may be followed by the
negative suffix “*sɛ*” to restrict the scope of negation in more detail
(see above).

#### **Tense and aspect**

Tense and aspect are marked by suffixes on the verb; while the markers, each of which is specific to either
tense or aspect, most often occur individually with a verb, they usually encode
a specific combination of tense and aspect.

**PFV** -mɛ => perfective past

**IPFV** -ka => habitual present

**PST** -li => past in subordinate clause

**IPFV + PST** -kali => imperfective past

**FUT** -bolu => future

#### **Imperative-jussive mood**

The sole true morphological mood divorced from the tense-aspect
suffixes is the imperative-jussive mood, which is formed by suffixing
the personal pronoun to the verb, deleting “ma”; only “-ma”-verbs can be used
in this mood.

Second person imperatives are
straightforward, and simply imply a command to the addressee(s):

  help-2SG
  “Help!”

  live

“Come with me if you want to live!”\*

\* Dative doubles as comitative.

By suffixing 1st person pronouns,
jussive forms can be formed for the 1st person – with a change in meaning:

  help-1SG!
  “I hope I can help” / ”I want
 to help”
 hope we won’t have to help”
 hope we won’t have to help”
 to “help” / “Let’s help”

  house

“Clean (your) house!”

#### **Verbs of motion and locative verbs**

Verbs of motion encoding direction are formed by
using the dynamic verbal ending “*ma*”,
suffixed onto locative case postpositions (as well as combinations thereof);
similarly, so-called “locative verbs” are formed by suffixing the stative
endings “*hɛ*” and “*he*”, respectively.

A verb for putting something in a specific location
can be formed by simply inserting “da” before the verbal suffix /ma/.

#### **Converbs**

In Proto-Bokisig, converb suffixes were added to a
verb infinitive to express coordinating and subordinating senses. All the
converbs have different forms depending on whether the subject argument for the
converb is identical to that of the finite verb (same subject, SS) or not (different
subject, DS).

Different strategies are employed to differentiate
between SS and DS on converbs:

a)
Some converb
suffixes have completely different forms; those are most often derived from
different case endings, with the SS form being derived from a case restricted
to inanimate nouns, and the DS form from a case sufffix for animate nouns.

Example: The causal converb uses “ʔo” from the
dative case (only used with animate nouns) and “mɛʔu” from the ablative case
(only used with inanimate nouns) endings for the SS and DS endings,
respectively.

b)
Other
converbs use a base form suffix to express SS, and then suffix the additional
DS ending to this base form. This DS ending is identical to the proximal
demonstrative adjective “*ʔe*” (singular; the plural is “*ʔeʔe*”). It
is important to note that the suffix agrees in number with the subject of the
finite verb, and not that of the converb itself.

##### **Simultaneous CVB “*nɛ*(*ʔe*[*ʔe*])” (derived from conjunction “*nɛ*” = “and”)**

  student-PL

**“The students were quiet while writing on tablets.”**

  student

**“While the student was writing, the teacher was quiet.”**

  student

**“While the student was writing, the teachers were quiet.”**

As the DS marker derives from the demonstrative “*ʔe(ʔe)*”, which referred to the following
noun phrase (i.e. the argument of the finite verb) it agrees in number with the
argument of the finite verb.

The imperfective aspect combined with the adverb
/kalu/ (“always) expresses “every time / whenever” – however, /kalu/ can also
be dropped and the interpretation left to context:

  (always)

**“Whenever I see Sumhebat he is not smiling” = “I’ve never seen him smile”.**

##### **Sequential CVB “*kusmɛ*(*ʔe*[*ʔe*])” (derived from “*kus-mɛ*” = one-LOC = “at first”)**

  king

**“After drinking, the king killed John.”**

  king

**“After the king drank, John killed him.”**

  king

**“After the king drank, he was killed** (or rather, ‘somebody unnamed killed him’).”

##### **CVB for indirect speech and some other subordinate clauses: “*sa*” (SS) / “*saʔe[ʔe])*” (DS)**

The converb form does not specify the tense of the reported
sentence; adverbs of time may be inserted right before the converb form to make
this clear, including the most generic forms “li” for the past and “bolu” for the future.

  2pl

**“I don’t know whether the person you guys saw yesterday will buy bread here”**

This converb can also be used for other subordinate clauses:

  1sg

**“I’m disappointed about being alone today”**

There are special constructions using “sama” (an archaism for “to say”) in the first person jussive mood for saying that somebody wants or needs somebody to do something. Since the first person jussive is formed by suffixing the personal pronoun (1SG or 1PL) to the verb, the different-subject (DS) marker is not used on the converb in those cases.

  2SG

“I hope to say that you [will] kill [or: have killed] one of my children”

**= “I need you to kill one of my children.”**

  2SG-GEN.AL

In the past, there is a difference between the perfective and imperfective aspect; the perfective aspect means that the person unsuccessfully tried to do the thing in question.

  1SG

**"I (unsuccessfully) tried to hate you"**

##### **Causal CVB “ʔo” (SS)/“mɛʔu” (DS) (from DAT and ABL case, respectively)**

The converb expressing a causal relationship uses
the suffixes for the dative case (if used as a case ending, this is restricted to animate nouns) and the locative case (normally only used with inanimate nouns); the former is used if the subject of the converb is identical to that
of the finite verb, and the latter if there is a different subject.

  2sg

**“As you have insulted the king, you will soon die.”**

  plant

**“Because the plant isn’t red, the king is angry.”**

##### **CVB for an action interrupted by another action** (that of the finite verb): “*kanɛ*” (SS)/ “*kanɛʔe[ʔe]*” (DS) (from IPFV + “and”)

  2pl

**“While you were eating the bread bought by John, you (suddenly) noticed me.”**

  1sg

**“While I was eating bread, some people started shouting.”**

##### **CVB for manner/means: “xi” (SS) / “du” (DS) (from ABL (for animates) and INSTR, respectively)**

  run-CVB.INSTR

**“They are chasing each other in circles.”**

  2sg

**“With your help, I succeeded!”**

If used with stative verbs, this is often equivalent to what would be an adverb in other languages:

  sun

**“Then the Sun shined out warmly”.**

The fact that switch reference is marked on the
converb allows dropping pronouns fairly liberally:

  strong-CVB.INSTR.DS

**“Somebody (unnamed) will kick me hard!”**

##### **Adversative converb “*agubo*” (SS) / “*kanɛʔe[ʔe]*” (DS) (from “into the wind” / IPFV + “and”, respectively)**

NB: The DS form is identical to that of the converb for one action interrupted by another.

  2SG

**“You hear the words, but do not listen.”**

  fruit

**“Fruit damages teeth, but is nonetheless healthy”.**

  sweet
 unhealthy’-CVB-DS

**“Even though sugary food is unhealthy, I eat it all the time.”**

##### **Converb for purpose “*hɛ*“ (SS) / “*bo*” (DS)**

  1SG

**“I will visit my friend, or he will visit me.”**

NB: “go to somebody in order to speak (to them)”, expressed converbially, is the standard way to express “visit”. Similarly, “to meet” (not coincidentally!) is expressed by “speak-CVB.SS RECIPR ‘go to’”:

  1SG

**“A friend and me always used to meet up in the village.”**

NB: The place where the meeting takes place is in the lative case.