(Today is Part 1 of a 2-Parter…)

Porto-Krelyic or Pre-Karyoł (at any rate ‘PK’) exists right now not so much as sketchlang as a collection of typological notions. One of these is that at the morphological level the primary opposition is not one of ‘stem’ and ‘affix’ but of ‘phonological word’ and ‘grammatical word’. Critics abound. One of the over-arching themes behind the Karyoł project is phonological attrition and cliticization – the reason being, in order to accomplish all I want to do historically, I’d have to roll out and decommission morphology at what I would consider an unnaturalistic rate. Consider the English third person singular present in -s, a suffix with at least 7000 years of history behind it. The English copula clitic -’s is of far more recent origin, and in some dialects, one of which I group hearing everyday, it’s already been retired from active duty. In North Georgia you can hear quite a few people say He goin for He’s going. Some linguists would of course argue that in these dialects the -’s hasn’t disappeared but in fact was actually never there – but that’s really beside the point. Or perhaps it is the point.

Let’s consider, for a moment, that clitics are in fact the phrase-level equivalent to the affix. Not only do they tend to carry similar kinds of meanings, they also tend to exhibit similar morphosyntax. Among affixes, we have prefixes, suffixes, and infixes (among others we won’t mention because they don’t help my argument), and among clitics we have proclitics, which come before a phrase; enclitics, which follow a phrase; and that special sort that fall in Wackernagel position. There aren’t any clitics we know of that come in penultimate position, and, at least according to Stephen R. Anderson, there aren’t any infixes that fill in a slot right before the last segment in a word.

It seems to me that the correct use of clitic morphology may be just a bit more elusive to speakers than inflectional morphology. Affixes have rules and structure, and though the meanings they produce may be non-compositional, their deployment is rigidly predictable. Any system of clitic deployment, however, will be more complicated than an affix system by a power of n, where n is the number of parts of speech that will accept the clitic. (When that occurred to me, I actually thought it was a bit of a joke, but the more I think about it, the more it seems to make sense.). So it seems to me that the speakers who say He goin have just decided to hell with a semantically-meaningless form with a grotesquely complex syntax.

I also feel that the opposite may happen too. Once a clitic becomes significantly bleached, it can appear in all positions available – speakers overcompensate by way of hypercorrection. I’m thinking about the first person enclitic in Sandawe that appears on every word in the sentence but the verb (See Conlangery, Episode 54.)

Today’s Grammaticalizanuary post begins in the distant past with just such an overused clitic, it(a) ‘already’. I’m not sure how long in the past we’re discussing, but probably between -3000 and -2500 AT. Let’s call it -2750. At this point in PK resultative senses may be productively formed from a dynamic verb stem through the addition of the proclitic adverbial element it(a) ‘already’; with daugod this produces it=daugod or it=taugod. Over the next 400 years, this construction is grammaticalized to mark a broader range of stative expressions; when attached to a stative verb it= forms the present, and the unmarked form takes on inchoative meanings. it(a)= may be used to form stative verbs from abstract (or less-concrete) nouns: one such example would be: it=nau ‘to be blind’ from nau ‘blindness, a blind man’. – If all of this sounds familiar, that’s probably because this is straight out of The Evolution of Grammar. Now it gets a little weird: stress-bearing it(a) ‘already’ still exists in the language, and the full and reduced forms are similar enough that speakers are aware of its historical connection to each other. As full and reduced it(a) are both capable of existing in the same sentence together, there’s nothing stopping multiple permutations of stative-present-marking reduced it(a)= from leaping off and connecting to the beginning of every word after the verb. Even though PK is predominantly SOV, it places oblique phrases and focus information after the verb – there’s plenty of material to mark gratuitously.

So not long after its inception as a resultative, it(a)= becomes thoroughly regularized as a present tense marker. The distinction between ittaugod and daugod has been obliterated. However, a new wave of enclitic and suffixal morphology is developing, the result of language contact. One of these new pieces of morphology is -mah ‘anterior ’ from mah ‘yesterday’, which is appended once more to process verbs to produce a resultative.

One of the reasons why I feel conlangers are attracted to the theory of grammaticalization is that it rescues our morphology from the cold tables of inflection we all used to post on the internet in the 90’s and it breathes into it the same sort of life and personality we love about our favorite words. For those of who are interested in how morphology develops from an incomplete bleaching of a word’s semantics, and then of course the subsequent reduction of its phonological material, we’re particularly interested in the fact that bleaching is incomplete, and that it leaves a measure of semantic residue behind. Rather than inflectional material applying perforce to the entire vocabulary with exactly the same outcomes, we can imagine specific relationships developing between individual words and individual affixes.

it=taugod is one such close relationship. Even though it(a)= is proclitic in most cases, it forms a tight bond in this particular instance. (I believe, but am not certain, this is an instance of what Lehman would call ‘univerbation’.) This more marked form continues to be used for the more abstract ‘to know’ (alongside more concrete daugod ‘to learn’), and it’s to this more marked form -mah is attached; the result is ittaugodmah, which results in Karyoł etōgona.

We’ll talk about weird things to do with etōgona tomorrow.