Today I’m going to introduce a new modal quasi-auxiliary and differentiate between weak obligation and strong obligation. – Modals in Karyoł operate according to an accusative scheme – and this makes sense. Modality is far more concerned with what an actor may or may do, and less concerned with whether or not an O is affected or unaffected.

What I’m looking at, then, is intransitives and statives as my lexical sources. Bybee lists a number of both in her list of lexical sources for weak obligation, and two jump out at me – ‘see’, which is used in Maithili, an IE language spoken in Nepal, and ‘fall’, which is used in Baluchi. I don’t know how ‘see’ operates in a Maithili, but in Karyoł it’s a member of a set of ‘extended intransitives’ which have a closely assosiated ri-marked NP. ‘fall’ is also interesting – it looks like we’re looking at a case of a S=O verb (semantics are essentially secondary) carrying over a sense of [-volition]. I like that.

‘The liver is the seat of emotion and mental processes’ is an enduring Karyoł conceptual metaphor. Much like our sense of the four humors, it’s particularly associated with passion and hot tempers. The

tuli ‘flint’ dates back from one of the earliest big vocabulary expansions – maybe from March of 2014. I don’t remember creating the word itself, but the entry is glossed with etymological ideas to make creating a cognate in Gralli as easy as possible (over time I’ve gotten lazy and have stopped doing that!) The word tuli doesn’t seem particularly ‘noun-y’ to me, although there’s also no reason why it couldn’t be a noun. If I were creating the word now, it would honestly probably be tolem, with my quite frequently used –Vm suffix…

To get back to the point at hand – I had made notes that it would correspond to a word in Gralli meaning ‘heat’. Interesting. So let’s recast tuli as a verb for just a second and see where that takes us.

The most obvious related verbal sense dealing with ‘heat’ is probably ‘to spark’. Okay. I already have word imiłi– which means ‘to spark’, which has related senses ‘to fly off’ and ‘to break into chips’. I’m pretty happy with those, and imiłi– is already pretty well integrated into one of my words for ‘amber’. – So ignoring the obvious but also more specific sense of ‘to spark’, I think I’m actually just going to stick with ‘to heat up’.

So let’s say at some point in the past – and pretty far in the past – there was a verb tuli ‘to heat up’. A noun is created through Ø-modification (another noun created this way gowe ‘drinker’), which means ‘fire-starter’ and may be applied either to a person or his tools (cf hāma ‘engraver’ or ‘engraver’s burin’). Over time, though, the word comes only to refer to the tools themselves (as anyone can make a fire), and refers especially to flint. Let’s also have a parallel form with explicit nominal morphology develop – we’ll forget the fairly common –(V)m and use instead the far rarer –yaɲ: tolyaɲ, ‘flint’.

So what happens to the verb? Its semantics are pretty close in keeping with the word ihi, and so let’s say it gets shouldered out and comes to mean ‘to warm up (intr) in the sun or by being kept close to the body, etc’. And this sense of mild change of state and no sense of volition is what forms the basis for the new auxiliary.

By 0 AT tuli has taken on two additional senses: epistemic probability and a kind of future, perhaps immediate future. These senses develop entirely out of the auxiliary and its meanings. I’ll have to do some translation to work out exactly how they function.