Early Bokisig

Typology
Word order: SOV (cf. Syntax)

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.

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”: “All priests have beards”:

An adverbial way of expressing the same thing would be: “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:

“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.

"It wasn't water that killed my friend"

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

Examples:

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

Copulas
 There exist various copulas:

Some further examples:   He is a fisherman.

 “kun” is the copula for “noun = noun” constructions; personal pronouns are frequently dropped.  '''S/he is strong. '''

''Stative verbs are used for predicative adjectives''  '''He is my husband. '''

''This uses the same construction as the “fisherman” example above.''  '''He is in my house. '''

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

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):

“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: “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”)
“The students were quiet while writing on tablets.” ''' “While the student was writing, the teacher was quiet.” ''' “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: '''“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”)
“After drinking, the king killed John.” ''' “After the king drank, John killed him.”  “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.

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

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

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. "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.

“As you have insulted the king, you will soon die.” “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”)
“While you were eating the bread bought by John, you (suddenly) noticed me.”  “While I was eating bread, some people started shouting.” 

CVB for manner/means: “xi” (SS) / “du” (DS) (from ABL (for animates) and INSTR, respectively)
  “They are chasing each other in circles.”  “With your help, I succeeded!” 

If used with stative verbs, this is often equivalent to what would be an adverb in other languages: “Then the Sun shined out warmly”.

 The fact that switch reference is marked on the converb allows dropping pronouns fairly liberally:  “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. “You hear the words, but do not listen.”

                                                                                                             “Fruit damages teeth, but is nonetheless healthy”.

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

Converb for purpose “hɛ“ (SS) / “bo” (DS)
   “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’”:  “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.