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Pabappa to English English to Pabappa
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ADJECTIVES AND ADVERBS
Adjectives are historically descended from a few types of verbs that evolved mutated suffixes that became shorter and eventually could no longer take functional tense or person markers (although a few such markers do survive vestigially). They cannot take case markers either unless they have a nominal suffix before the case marker. Some adjective-forming suffixes are:
Although adjectives cannot function as nouns or stand alone, they can take a definite suffix that will turn them into definite nouns without taking away the special meaning of temporariness that they carry. This suffix is -p, the same suffix that goes onto all other stems to mark them out as nouns in the nominative case. In the case of adjectives ending in -la, the -p will be realized as a zero morph anyway. As for -pa, it can be nominalized too, with the same invisible suffix. Some adjectives describe supposedly temporary states but often need to be used as nouns without the temporary meaning. Pampumbla means "tall" as an adjective, but it cannot be used by itself as a noun describing a tall person, even though it is a very nounlike concept not normally associated with temporary states of being. The solution is to replace the degenerate verb morpheme -la with another degenerate verb morpheme, -(b)up, which turns the word into what morphologically speaking is an ordinary noun. Thus pampumup means "tall thing". Technically speaking, this is only the stem of the noun, but since the nominative case marker on a noun ending in p is zero, the nominative case form is the same. A summary of all the different adjective and adjective-related endings that have been discussed above is in the table below:
When an adjective describes a noun with a case other than nominative, its case must change to match that of the noun it modifies. Note that the ending taken will rhyme with that of the noun, even if the adjective belongs to a different stem class:
Adjectival clauses consisting of multiple words will take the rhyming repeated case ending only on the last word in the clause, regardless of its meaning or grammatical role:
English has some adjective compounds called bahuvrihi which use ellipsis to achieve a shorter word. Examples are redhead, white collar, longhair. Pabappa cannot do this; it must instead build compound words with the final element in the compound being "person", "place", "thing", or something more specific. For example, the word for a blond person is wisipop, formed from wisip "blonde hair" and -bop "person". Many suffixes are inherently adjectivizing, but again, words that take them can be turned into nouns with the suffix -p which usually is realized as a zero morpheme. ADVERBS In English, adverbs indicate the time, place, reason, manner, aspect, mood, voice, or degree of a certain action. Pabappa does not have a truly distinctive class of words called adverbs; the role of adverbs in English is filled in Pabappa mostly by adjectives, except for the more abstract words, which tend to be expressed as particles. Where an adverb in English is transparently derived from a noun and indicates location in space or time, Pabappa will use the locative case, as in the following examples:
Where an adverb in English indicates performing in action in some particular manner, Pabappa finds the proper word stem, and then adds a reduplication of the previous verb ending to it:
If the adverb is derived from a noun, Pabappa uses a suffix, -op, similar in meaning to English -ly, and then adds the reduplicated verb ending:
If the phrase being affected is a multi-word noun clause, then the verb ending is only added to the final word in the clause, even if that word is not a noun:
In English, aspect, mood, and voice form another category of meaning that can be expressed by adverbs. In Pabappa they are always expressed by suffixes on the verb itself, rather than by separate words. Another use of adverbs in English is to indicate the degree of an action. This is normally limited to a few words with essentially the same meaning, such as "very" and "extremely", and their negatives. Pabappa sees this type of word as being the adjective's counterpart to nouns' numbers, and treats them accordingly; that is, they are simply compounded onto the verb or adjective as the (usually) final element.
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These suffixes can also be used on nouns in a different way. Earlier there were different stems for the noun and adjective suffixes, but now they are the same. However, they still vary for person:
In some cases if an adjective is followed by a form of pispa, it will "conjugate" to match, although the conjugations it uses are merely copied from pispa and do not go back to the actual Pespimbesa verb conjugations, which varied according to the stem type of the verb. Thus this type of construction may cause the entire sentence to rhyme. For example, pom blabebom pissom means "I am smart" and repeats the morpheme pom three times in three different phonetic forms. (In Pespimbesa, the sentence would have simply been wabipla, where -pla is the Pespimbesa equivalent to Pabappa pom.) -pa comes both from Pespimbesa -pa (which is itself a merger of two things) and from -pad; the confusion of suffixes led to the dissolution of tense distinctions in modern Pabappa adjectives and the consequential need to use forms of pispa following every adjective used as a verb. Meanwhile, since the intransitive and passive verb conjugations have also died out, -pa is no longer a valid verbal ending and has come to be used solely by adjectives. In other words, Pabappa's adjectives still behave the same way as Pespimbesa's, that is, as verbs; but now it often takes a suffixed verb to get them to work that way.
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