Lexember the 21st

le’ [ɬeʔ]
1.) cop – to be (attributive copula)
2.) cop – to be [at/on/in] (positional copula)
3.) intr – to come, to move in the direction of the speaker or of the most salient discourse participant
4.) trans – to put, to set down, to set up
5.) trans – to bring sthn, to lead smn toward the speaker or the salient discourse participant
6.) aux – … This’ll be used in a ton of auxiliary constructions, promise, just haven’t figured out the what-when-where-why-hows just yet.

PP adpositions describe position or movement, but do not specify movement in which direction. This distinction is made on the verb: the unmarked form is used for either movement in an unspecified direction or movement specifically away from the speaker. The venitive, usually marked in –(e)’, is used for direction toward the speaker. The venitive may also be used to mark specific movement on a verb that is in general neutral to movement – so we can form kuŋkuŋe’ ‘bring a round object’ from kuŋkuŋ ‘handle a round object’ and pxamcu’ ‘come this way rocking back and forth’ from pxamcu (see Lexember the 17th). The addition of this suffix to le’, however, which has a stem already ending in , does not change its surface realization – leading to the polysemy ‘to be at’/‘to come’.

There might be some weird residue from the word’s copula origins – I’m doing verbs of handling that mark the shape/consistency of O (called ‘class’ of O as opposed to ‘gender’) and so I might do something really crazy like, I don’t know, make le’ available to use as a verb of handling (in its ‘bring/lead’ sense) with an O of any class, provided that A an O are both of the same class. Does that seem, you know, real?

Phew, my writing has gotten bad! – Thanks for bearing with –

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