Conlang Showcase Extra: Negation in Nekāchti

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For my Nekāchti Showcase video, there was plenty of stuff I wanted to include but had to cut to keep the video at a reasonable length. One of those things was elaborating on the particulars of Nekāchti’s system of negation. You may recall from the showcase that Nekāchti’s tense suffixes each have a positive, negative, and interrogative form.  

Tsitarāthra, “I’m going”

Tsitarātsāta, “I’m not going”

Tsitarātsōra “Am I going?” 

So, the obvious question is: how do you say, “Isn’t he/she going?”. That is, how do you ask a negative question? The answer, as always, requires an understanding of the language’s history, and also brings up a couple of interesting points about the implications of negation.  

In Proto-Thirēan there was a negative auxiliary ta. 

The sikaa, “I am going”

The sikaa ta, “I am not going”

This auxiliary acts much the same as the many other auxiliary verbs that Proto-Thirēan uses to express TAM information. However, Proto-Thirēan doesn’t allow a verb to be modified by more than one auxiliary. So then, how do you negate a phrase that already has an auxiliary in place? For example:

The sikaa phüe, “I need to go”

In such a case, the negative auxiliary is rendered as an adverb and is placed before the element it negates. 

The sikaa taii phüe, “I don’t need to go”

The taii sikaa phüe, “I must not go”

Notice how the above two sentences convey different meanings. This is what Searle and Vanderveken term “illocutionary and propositional negation”. In our two sentences, the former is illocutionary negation, where the auxiliary verb is negated, while the latter is propositional negation, where the lexical verb is negated (or at least that’s a very heavily simplified explanation of what these terms mean in this context. In actuality, it’s a lot more complicated than that and it's all well beyond me). 

So in Proto-Thirēan, the negative auxiliary is used to negate a main verb, but if any other auxiliary is present, the negative adverb is used. This includes when the question auxiliary alo is used. 

The sikaa ta, “I’m not going” 

The sikaa alo, “Am I going?”

The taii sikaa alo, “Am I not going?”

As the Thirēan languages evolved, the ta and alo auxiliaries developed into full-fledged verbs, eventually taking all relevant TAM marking while the lexical verb was rendered as a participle, and ultimately, in Nekāchti, they became suffixed and turned into what are now the negative and interrogative forms of the tense suffixes. However, Nekāchti still retains the negative adverb, now of the form tē, which still fulfils many of the same functions as it did in Proto-Thirēan, including (in answer to the original question) negating interrogatives:

Tsitarāthra, “I’m going”

Tsitarātsāta, “I’m not going”

Tsitarātsōra “Am I going?” 

Tē tsitarātsōra, “Aren’t I going?’

It’s very important to note that Nekāchti’s negative verb forms, because of the way they evolved, confer, by default, illocutionary negation. For example, translating “I need to go” using the necessative form gives us tsitātsopta. The negative form of this word, tsitātsiprāta doesn’t mean “I must not go”, it means “I don’t need to go”. If you want to say, “I must not go”, you’d have to use the negative adverb to make Tē tsitātsopta. 

Along those same lines, if you had an auxiliary verb construction like chōnto tsikelo “I can swim”, negating the auxiliary verb gives chōnto tsikōta “I am unable to swim”, whereas negating the converb gives Tē chōnto tsikelo, “I am able to not swim”, or you could even combine the two to make Tē chōnto tsikōta “I am unable to not swim”. 

So I guess the take away of all this is that negation can be quite tricky, and that you should think carefully about the scope and parameters of your negation strategies.