{"id":27,"date":"2017-11-29T17:34:10","date_gmt":"2017-11-29T22:34:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kayeboesme.com\/pangrammatike\/?p=27"},"modified":"2021-04-29T21:11:22","modified_gmt":"2021-04-30T01:11:22","slug":"narahji-noun-classes-insults","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kayeboesme.com\/pangrammatike\/2017\/11\/29\/narahji-noun-classes-insults\/","title":{"rendered":"Insults in Narahji: The Noun Class Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

(A partial repost from Tumblr with some new content.)<\/em><\/p>\n

The Narahji spoken in\u00a0Epiphany<\/em> is not always internally consistent because it’s the Narahji of a changing time. Salus is navigating a complex world of formal, standardized Narahji and informal Narahji. In 1865 Standard Count, the year\u00a0Epiphany<\/em> takes place, language activists are working hard on a referendum that won’t make headway until the 1880s to recalibrate official Narahji based on outside-of-the-office usage.<\/p>\n

When I say \u201cNarahji,\u201d I also mean the Narahji that is taught in schools \u2014 this is a canyon region over a thousand kilometers across and several hundred kilometers top to bottom on a map, so there are a lot of small dialects and regional languages.<\/p>\n

Kati and Salus have an exchange in Entry 39<\/a>\u00a0in which Salus is offended by Kati’s use of slang for the word\u00a0family<\/em>. In pre-reform Narahji, the word is\u00a0ku bvyad\u00f6<\/em>, a noun in the animate class. It will become\u00a0ku pho<\/em>, the slang term Salus dislikes, once reform takes hold. Ler distaste for the slang term mirrors common discomfort among speakers who feel ownership of a language when that language changes. Like many speakers, Salus is complicated \u2014 le also picks and chooses which linguistic innovations le’s comfortable using in writing.<\/p>\n

Regardless of whether one uses\u00a0ku bvyad\u00f6<\/em> or\u00a0ku pho<\/em>, I’d like to talk about the noun class system, AKA the linguistic gender applied to nouns in Narahji. When I developed the disrespect system in Narahji, I had an exciting opportunity to apply something I found interesting in Aikhenvald’s\u00a0How Gender Shapes the World<\/a><\/em>. Outside of Indo-European languages, many will employ gender inversions when disparaging a noun or the thing the noun represents.<\/p>\n

This is the pronoun system for modern Narahji. The most important bits of it are the animate\/inanimate pronouns.<\/p>\n