Lexitechnia

Feels like it’s been a long time since I’ve worked on Kirumb, for some reason.

So, one of my projects in it is to make sure I have a decent amount of vocabulary.  The official beginning of this is translations of all the NSM primes.   I already had words for ‘I’ and ‘you’, but I confirmed their declensions:

• Å¡oÅ‹, mos.(ˈʃʊŋ) pron. (acc.mi, abl.mit, dat.mai, loc.mi.)  I; the first-person singular pronoun.  [Proto-Indo-European *eǵHom.]
• tó, cos. (tuː) pron. (acc. ci, abl. cit, dat. cai, loc. ci.) You; the second-person singular pronoun. [Proto-Indo-European *tÅ« .]

The declension of tó actually shows a bit of analogical levelling; the genitive should actually be tos, but it becomes cos to match the rest of the stem, and the pattern in šoŋ.

The next word on the list is ‘someone’.  This is a tough one!  I had a firm idea it should not be something monomorphemic, like the Greek τις is.  I found Sanskrit कश्चन kaÅ›cana and decided to go with it.   For the first element I used the Proto-Indo-European *kÊ·is ‘who’; the affix is *kÊ·ene which denotes ‘Verallgemeinerung und Unbestimmtheit’ —so the  literal meaning would be ‘whoever’, I suppose, which is a meaning the final Kirumb word will also have.

I think I will use *kÊ·ene in a few places as a clitic particle that would go on the end of the declined form of the word (like Latin’s -cumque).  Because of this I needed to put together the whole declension of Kirumb’s reflex of *kÊ·is.

It’s ridiculously irregular. Luckily it all goes away with the rest of the case system in Âdlantki.

So there’s our word for ‘who’; we still need our word for ‘someone’.  The original *kÊ·ene comes out in Kirumb as -kin; the declension of kiskin ‘someone’ looks like this:

In most forms, due to the late loss of the original final -e, the stress is not in the place normally expected by Kirumb stress rules.  I have underlined the stressed syllables in these cases.  (It just happens that these are the same syllables accented in the unsuffixed forms of kis, but I’m not yet sure whether this will necessarily be the case whenever -kin is added.)