An homage to Star Wars :)
May the 4th be with you… (image credit: Wikipedia)
Why is it okay Chinuk Wawa when you say hayas(h)-ánqati ‘very long ago’…
…but not when you attempt the equivalent intensified time adverbs, *hayas(h)-álta (for *’right now’ I guess) and *hayas(h)-áłqi (for *’far in the future’)?
In principle, my belief is that all adverbs ought to be able to take the same inflectional affixes. Why in heck would there be any exceptions, I marvel?
I think there are multiple reasons why these “tense” words don’t behave alike, when combining with the early creolized Intensifier prefix hayas(h)-.
Reason 1.
Alone of these 3 words, the (distant-)past time marker ánqati can also be freely used as an adjective modifying nouns. I sense this association to be a clue that ánqati has felt like a more “time-stable”, settled concept to speakers (as nouns are), and thus less open to possible change. This leads us to:
Reason 2.
Could the facts we’re examining have anything to do with the root word ánqati (distant past) being “realis” — linguist talk for something that’s already a settled fact — vs. álta & áłqi‘s more “irrealis” nature? Casting this idea in other terms, I think it makes sense that you can characterize a situation as ‘definitely very long ago ~ definitely far in the past’. By contrast, if we see claims about ‘now’ & ‘the future’ as more tentative, then it’s not so easy to imagine describing a situation as ‘very maybe occurring’.
Reason 3.
Semantics: it’s actually hard for me to imagine what the translations of *hayas(h)-álta and *hayas(h)-áłqi would be. How can a time be ‘very-now’ or ‘very-future’ in the first place?
Dear English-speaking readers, don’t be fooled by your language’s ability to call fashions & stuff ‘very now’ or ‘very future’! Those are not time expressions! They’re irrelevant here!
Have I explained a darn thing here? 🙂
[Editing to add, thanks to a conversation in the Facebook Chinook Jargon group — by corollary, it’s also grammatically fine to inflect ‘long ago’ for the Diminutive: tənəs-ánqati is normal for ‘a little while ago’.]
Kloosh spos lakit kunamokst mika.
The only ‘very future’ I can think of offhand in English is one could say ‘very far in the future’ or ‘very far in the distant future, some 5 billion years from now, our sun will turn into a red giant’. But it’s not a typical turn of phrase anyone would encounter. And maybe Wawa speakers tend to avoid that sort of phrase at all. (Tho’ now I am wondering how “red giant star” would come out in Wawa…)
‘Red giant star’ sounds like it would be easy to say in Jargon; ‘red giant’ by itself would be weird. Also, ‘far’ in the future would be odd because the word for ‘far’ is pretty much confined to describing physical distances!
Fun! I was trying to think of red giant star in Hanis and I can’t think of one that would work well but Siuslaw as an augmentative so it could be iktilma tlkwit tsuum or ikt tlkwit tsuumilma or something like that.