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Pabappa to English English to Pabappa
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DERIVATION AND NEOLOGISM Pabappa can form new words by means of derivational suffixes, a class of morphemes that behaves like ordinary noun roots except that they normally never occur by themselves. If they do occur by themselves, they need to have pap "thing" serve as a root. Suffixes are marked with (suf) in the dictionary so that they can be easily set apart. Pabappa numbers are a subset of the suffixes, and they are in a sort of decimal system:
You cannot compound these numerals together to form larger numerals; paptapibi means neither 45 nor 59 but "nine groups of five". So Pabappa cannot natively count higher than ten, although it does have a "times ten" suffix so that multiples of ten can be expressed. Instead, for larger numerals, Pabappa loans its number system from its alphabet, which is ultimately derived from the Moonshine language. More on this on the numbers page. Pabappa also has a few sets of word-modifying suffixes that are used to create words for new objects similar to well-known ones. Wipsam is used to indicate a smaller version of something, wapta a larger version, and wase a similar-sized but differently shaped version of something, similar to English -oid. So blisse means human, blissewipsam means dwarf, blissewapta means giant, and blissewase means humanoid. These suffixes are not normally used for simple expression of size and shape; they have to speak about actually different objects. So the concept of "very large human" would be expressed in Pabappa as blisse weblam, simply "big human". There is also a set of noun suffixes that performs functions similar to Pabappa's cases, but is not considered part of the case system because it doesn't change form depending on the form of the noun stem, as do the true cases. Also, they must take a case inflection after them. This class includes morphemes such as papli "into" and paplu "out of" (note that these still have to have the locative case attached). -psa is primarily a partitive suffix, but it can also serve to form adjectives out of certain nouns, such as paliappsa "dark" from paliap "night, darkness". Some suffixes are more like verb modifiers: pampa expresses the concept of being self-acting, not helped from outside; e.g. posespampala "to explode by oneself, self-destruct". DIMINUTIVES AND AUGMENTATIVES Most words in Pabappa that are more than two syllables long are either loanwords or compounds. Despite retaining these words for often thousands of years, they are not yet truly assimilated into Pabappa's lexicon and all of them have alternate forms that are shorter. These shorter forms are associated with young children and can be considered a type of diminutive, called blopopopo, "child word", or blopa. The blopa version of a word is formed by taking the first syllable and the onset of the next syllable, and then adding -a, -i, or -o. Generally speaking, -a is neutral, -i signifies something small or reduced, and -o signifies a large or round piece of something. The vowels i and o can alternate with each other essentially freely to show the size of an object or the force of a verb. This goes back to a sound change early in Pabappa's history whereby proto-Bloppabop y became i in northern Pabappa and o in southern Pabappa in some words. The southern forms of the words were perceived as being bigger and stronger, and imitation of the opposite dialect by both groups obliterated the sound change distinction and changed it into a grammatical alteration. Since any word can undergo this type of alteration, such altered forms are not listed in the dictionary unless they have acquired a distinct meaning. The names of most animals and plants, as well as foods, are loanwords, and thus are rarely encountered in any form other than the blopa form except when dealing with science. Similarly, names of people and places are likely to be prone to diminutivization. Some more adverbial suffixes are: pas, to turn a frequentative verb into a punctual one; pam, to turn a punctual verb into a repeated one; and po, used to combine the functions of a diminutive and a verbal suffix. The diminutive suffixes -as and -am, derived from the first two, also exist as allomorphs of the above. Since Pabappa lacks a native vocabulary for many concepts in modern technology, it needs to make new words to express such concepts. Pabappa can make new words in a variety of ways. It can build give new meanings to old word roots, such as lilip "membrane", which also means "umbrella". It can make compounds of native roots as well. Pabappa compounds cannot include case-inflected nouns or tense-inflected verbs. Thus some concepts have to be expressed my multiple-word phrases. An example is puipup wimpsappsabup, literally "one who watches secretly", which is the Pabappa translation for spy. Puipup is the habitual noun form of puipla "to watch" and wimpsappsa is the partitive form, which always functions as an adjective, of wimpsap, "a secret". Pabappa has no abbreviation mechanism, so some compound phrases can get very long. The initial consonant of a word can change to bl to show that it is a food. It can change to r to signify that it is "magic". An example of a word undergoing three types of mutation is bloso, meaning beef: it is derived from the word for cow, pisuala, shortened to piso, augmentatized to poso, and finally mutated to bloso.
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