Sambahsa in Six Minutes #1 : Nasal Infixes (download here !)
By Robert Winter
Summary / Summario / Resuma
English: This is the first of a series of short lessons in Sambahsa. The idea is to gradually build up a working
knowledge of this language, a few minutes at a time. I hope by doing this I will be able to write literature in Sambahsa
in 2011. My literary language for 2010 remains Lingwa de Planeta.
Summario in Interlingua: Un lection parve in Sambahsa.
Resuma in LdP: Syao Sambahsa leson.
Without further ado, let's learn some Sambahsa. First up, a tricky beast called the nasal infix. In order to
conjugate Sambahsa verbs, you must be able to recognise a nasal infix. Don't worry, it's not as hard as it
sounds, and fortunately it doesn't involve inspecting the contents of your nose.
A nasal infix is a nasal consonant (“n” or “m”) present in the final syllable of the stem of a verb, where:
(1) that syllable is unstressed; and
(2) an “e” immediately follows or precedes the infix; and
(3) the “e” is also preceded or followed, respectively, by one or more consecutive consonants; that is, the
“e” is surrounded by consonants which are immediately adjacent to it.
Consecutive consonants are called a consonantal cluster.
In other words, you can recognise a nasal infix by looking at the last three to six letters of the stem of a verb.
If these consist only of a consonant (or consonantal cluser) followed by “e” followed by another consonant
(or consonantal cluster), and at least one of the consonants is either “ n” or “m”, then the syllable contains a
nasal infix.
Diagramatically, where “____” represents the start of the stem of the verb and “-” represents any consonant
or consonantal cluster, this means any of the following patterns:
____-en ____-em ____ne- ____me-
____-en- ____-em- ____-ne- ____-me-
Here are some examples of verb stems which contain nasal infixes. The matching patterns which allow us to
immediately recognise the nasal infix are underlined (that is, the syllable containing the infix):
posen
supressem
pineg
confuned
linekw
pressem
scinesd
annem
pregen
Strictly speaking, since one of the criteria for recognising a nasal infix is that the syllable to which it belongs
is unstressed when pronounced, you must know the rules of Sambahsa pronunication before you can
recognise a nasal infix. In practice, however, as long as the verb stem ends in a consonant you can ignore the
rules of pronunciation and simply rely on recognising the patterns above.
Why do we need to recognise nasal infixes? Because verbs containing a nasal infix are conjugated slightly
differently to other verbs. This is the only reason we care about nasal infixes.
Okay, so how does Sambahsa conjugate its verbs anyway?
Let's take a look...
Conjugation: Present Tense
First Person
Suffix Rule Verb Stem
(meaning)
First
Person
(meaning)
-m if the verb stem ends with a stressed syllable ending in a vocalic
sound, then suffix the stem with -m
gnah
(to be
born)
gnahm
(I am born)
-o if the verb stem ends with a stressed syllable ending in a consonantal
sound, then suffix the stem with -o
sehkw
(to follow)
supressem
(to
supress)
confuned
(to
confuse)
sehkwo
(I follow)
supremo
(I supress)*
confundo
(I
confuse)*
if the verb stem ends with an unstressed syllable, then do not add any
suffix to the stem at all; (note: io, the personal pronoun, must be used
in this case because there is no visible conjugation)
safer
(to travel)
entre
(to enter)
io safer
(I travel)
io entre
(I enter)
* If the verb stem contains a nasal infix then you must, before adding the suffixes described above, apply the
following rules to the syllable containing the nasal infix (the final syllable):
(1) first remove the “e”; and then
(2) if the syllable now contains “ss” or “s” between two consonants, remove the “ss” or “s”.
Examples of this are marked with an asterisk (*) in the table above.
For example, the verb stem supressem contains a nasal infix. First we apply the nasal infix rules above,
removing the “e” and removing the “ss”, which leaves us with suprem. Second we choose the correct suffix
according to the above table, which is -o (since suprem ends with a stressed consonantal sound). The final
result is supremo. Obviously you need to know the rules of pronunciation to know this. We will cover those
later.
Discussion
Although all this might seem complicated at first, it soon feels very natural, very human, very much like a
natural language but more regular and less difficult.
This should not be surprising: the system reflects the presumed practice in Proto-Indo-European and also the
current practice in some modern Indo-European languages; more importantly the system is exceedingly
concise without losing precision.
This conciseness comes in two ways: firstly, there is no need to use a personal pronoun for the subject of the
verb (one normally omits the pronoun, as in Spanish; thus “Io supremo.” and “Supremo.” have exactly the
same meaning, “I supress.”); secondly, verbs containing a nasal infix may actually become shorter when
conjugated. It feels natural and efficient to shorten them in this way.
Essentially one can think of Sambahsa as an easier, but far more lexically diverse, French or English (much
easier and far more concise but still retaining similar power and expressiveness as those two great
languages).
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