Friday 5 September 2014

Moten Word for the Day

ipa|nastu|l /ipaɲastuʎ/, verb: “to give birth to (s.o.)”

I actually did, until I decided to stop caring. Long story.

In any case, here we have a compound of istu|l with the noun pa|na: “birth”. It’s getting a bit more difficult to argue that istu|l still has its main meaning intact here (“to give birth” as “to summon birth”? Can work, but is a bit weird). It’s more a semantically bleached quasi-suffix used to form a verb out of a noun (as I mentioned before, Moten stems are usually stuck in a single part of speech, unlike say English stems which are happy to be verbed and nouned freely).

One thing I need to mention is that ipa|nastu|l is the standard verb used to refer to someone’s birth. But it focusses on the mother’s action, unlike the English “to be born”, which focusses on the child. So if you want to say that you were born on the 25th of March, you actually have to say in Moten that someone gave birth to you on that date. Since Moten is aggressively pro-drop, you don’t have to specify a subject at all, but it’s still considered present. The expression looks like this:

Gdan zoba|saj (opa) egevel|ziza ipa|nastu|l etok.

Literally: “gave birth to me on March 25th” (the word in parentheses is opa: “and”, which is optionally present between the name of the month and the name of the day).

Questions?


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