Little Confirmation about the patientive with -ey, niä and tawng

Started by Plumps, January 29, 2021, 04:26:04 PM

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Plumps

Kaltxì ma eylan.

Since there has been a bit of confusion lately about the use of the patientive ending with the diphthong ey, and I had a few official examples from back in the day in mind, I asked Karyu Pawl about it. To summarize, at some point it has been stated that the patientive on -ey is -eyt or -eyti; *-eyit has been deemed incorrect. I remembered (and indeed there were) 2 examples where KP used -eyit in the past and I wanted to make him aware of that. He answered and allowed me to relay that to the community (although he wants to include it in an upcoming blog post).

To quote:

Quote from: K. PawlAbout your "kifkeyit" question: I regard that today as an error. Or maybe it was "Early Na'vi" that has since evolved into a more uniform standard. Or maybe it was simply a typo. Yeah, that's it: a typo! :blush: Thanks for the heads up about that handout for the Na'vi class. I'll go back and change it in my file. I'm glad there were only two such instances on record.

So, Horen § 3.1.1.5 is correct and I will correct the examples in the Annotated Dictionary in a future update.

I also took the opportunity and ansked him about two verbs that were unclear to me:

Quote from: meI came across tawng which is given as 'duck or dive' in the dictionary. Since we don't have any examples of it, I am a bit unclear about its meaning.
Is it 'dive' in the sense of what you do before you swim? Or is it strictly the action of throwing yourself/jumping to the ground?

Btw, what's the difference between fyep and niä exactly?

His response:

Quote from: K. PawlTawng: Your first guess is correct. It refers to jumping into water. It could be used for jumping into water from the outside, as Olympic divers do off a diving board, or it could also be used when you're already swimming in the water and want to dive down deeper. A typical phrase would be, "tawng nemfa pay."

The difference between fyep and niä is that fyep is more static, while niä is more dynamic. That is to say, if I'm grasping or holding something steadily, it's fyep. But if something comes along and I reach out and suddenly grab it, it's niä.

Hope that is as informative for you as it is for me ;) Makto zong.

Vawmataw

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