Hapax legomenon in Copala Triqui

The word quita'a' which appears in this verse (Romans 14:14) is the only instance of this word in the New Testament, and I am not clear what it is supposed to mean.

Here is the PDF of the relevant passage in Romans:

It seems as if it might be a form of the verb ta'aa 'take, catch', but what causes the final glottal stop to appear?

Wrong font in FLEx

I thought I would share a silly little trick I stumbled upon recently.

If you cut and paste examples from some other document (e.g. Word) into a FLEx  example field, often the font or style looks weird.

 I believe that FLEx is trying to retain the font from the other document.

You can select the example, go to the toolbar and select the correct style (usually Default Paragraph).

But a quick and easy way to accomplish the same thing is to select the example, cut it, and then paste it back.  After the text is pasted in, it goes into the correct font.

Now it looks like this:

Gentiles = people apart

I worked out today that the phrase yuvii yaníj , literally 'people who are apart' is the phrase which translates 'Gentile' or 'Greek' in the Copala Triqui translation of the New Testament, as in the following passage:

Yuvii  is the ordinary word for 'people', and yaníj means 'apart, separated'.  So the combination 'people apart' or 'separated people' means 'Gentile'.

Here is an example of yaníj used in its more usual way to mean 'apart':

More on affirmative vaa in Triqui

In a previous entry here, I talked about the myserious vaa ne that comes at the end of many lines in our texts.

I noted that Barbara Hollenbach in her sketch of Copala Triqui writes

 'The verbs vaa32 'to exist' and uun1 'to become' often take a sentence of any type as a subject complement with no complementizer.  These verbs serve to affirm the truth of the complement sentence, and they can follow the complement as well as precede it'. 

This is an important clue to understanding syntax of such sentences.  The final vaa takes the preceding material as a subject complement.

However as I look at more examples, it is not clear that it correct to say that they affirm the truth of the preceding complement.  For some cases where the speaker is talking about future events, the vaa seems to express a hope that that the statement will be true.

Consider the following examples:

In this example, vaa comes after the clause 'and hopefully will live for three thousand years in this world.'  But it doesn't seem right to say that the speaker is affirming the truth of a hope.

Another example of the same thing:

Copala Triqui asa' 'when'

The Triqui complementizer asa' is rather unusual in its syntax.  It means 'when' for future events.  However, it is not followed by a verb in the potential aspect — the usual way to show future in Triqui.

Instead it is usually followed by the completive aspect, as in the following two examples:

This example seems to say literally  'I will speak to you when I arrived…'

The next example is also interesting:

In this example, look at the two instances of the verb 'yaj 'make, do'.  Both refer to future events, and the first instance has the regular morphology of potential aspect — qui'yaj.  The second instance follows asa', so it instead appears in the completive form qui'yaj.

This is somewhat reminiscent of the inversion of normal aspect morphology after the negative particle, when semantic future shows up with completive morphology.  However, after the negative, we also get the reverse — semantic past shows up with potential morphology.  The shift after asa' happens in only one direction.

Possibly we want to think of certain morphemes like asa' as having floating autosegmental material that suppresses the normal low register for the following verb?

Pop quiz on Dari spelling

To make sure that the students are learning the orthography, I'm giving them some pop quizzes like the following, where the task is to match spelling and phonetics.

Imageability, concreteness, and metaphor identification

This image shows a nice example of our metaphor identification procedure.  Each word in  a paragraph is graphed for its imageability and concreteness score, and
a.) highly imageable words
b.) that do not have a close semantic relationship to the topic of the paragraph
are likely to be metaphors.

The core of the imageability and concreteness rankings comes from psycholinguistic research, and we've expanded this core enormously by using WordNet sister terms to approximate these scores for words not contained in the original database.

Puzzling verb in Copala Triqui

It puzzles me that the verb achríj rá seems to mean both 'realize' and 'suspect'.  These have different properties of factivity in English -- the complement of 'realize' must be a fact, while the complement of 'suspect' does not have to be.  The same seems to be true for Spanish darse cuenta and sospechar.

We explained this to our speaker, who understands the difference between the English and Spanish, but still thinks the Triqui might mean both.  It's interesting that the Triqui lexicon divides up the semantic space of cognition differently that English.

Here's our current (imperfect!) entry for achríj rá: