daugod and ittaugodmah both have reflexes in contemporary Karyoł. daugod surfaces 2000 years later as łōgo, a hypercorrection from earlier łōgoł, with the meaning ‘to read, to study a topic, to make out, to discern’. ittaugodmah gives us etōgona in the South and ettogona in the North, where both forms have rather general semantics ‘savoir’ and ‘connaître’ as well as ‘to understand’. In the North ettogona also covers ‘to experience, to undergo’. Around -500 AT ettogona comes to be used in a type of serial verb or auxiliary verb construction I refer to as a ‘quasi-auxiliary’ construction – the quasi-auxiliary, in this case ettogona, comes clause-finally and acts as the head, taking the lexical verb as an ri-marked object. (Remember from Grammaticalizanuary the 1st that Karyoł’s ‘true auxiliaries’ function very much like modifiers.) The earliest uses of this construction follow the semantics of ettogona fairly closely – one may say gōam ettogona ‘to experience hardships’; where gōam ‘hardships’ is a noun, but one may also say itumba ettogona ‘to feel nervous’, where itumba is a stative verb (marked with the same it(a)= form we saw yesterday.

The full verb ettogona is one of class of ‘extended intransitives’ which are syntactically intransitive but are closely associated with a NP marked with the dative. And as the syntax of quasi-auxiliary ettogona closely follow that of full verb ettogona, these quasi-auxiliary constructions lower the valence of a transitive verb. As ettogona presupposes a human A argument, the valence change results in A=S with a O > oblique. This valence-decreasing effect, which really develops as an Iaccident from the semantics of the original full verb, comes to be as important as the sense ‘to experience’. At this point, around -300 AT, both senses occur with equal frequency.

Over the next one hundred years, quasi-auxiliary ettogona develops an habitual sense, but this habitual sense retains the detransitivizing grammar of the original construction. At 0 AT, ettogona may come either clause-finally or in Wackernagel position, but it hasn’t undergone any phonetic reductions that would lead it on the path to cliticization.

I mentioned on Grammaticalizanuary the 1st that Karyoł already has an imperfective, and that alignment is conditioned by transitivity requirements – and so one may surmise, and surmise correctly, that Karyoł already has a detransitivizing habitual mechanism implicit in its imperfective. What’s the difference? – Pragmatics. The imperfective is used when the aspect is expected by the speaker’s audience – or at least when aspect isn’t specifically inportant. But the periphrastic construction gets dragged in if the aspect itself is in focus – in keeping with the theme that new information tends to be placed in a privileged position, in this case Wackernagel position.

I’ll be coming back to edit this entry with some translations. I’ll be taking the day off tomorrow to cope with this cold that isn’t getting any better, and I’m hoping to get some good work in then 🙂