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"Bernd Lambert" <bl16@cornell.edu> Existing..0....(2). Life. …… .te maiu...... Being [noun].(no general term)........... There was iai ngkoa (4)................. There will be iai, when preceded by an adverbial phrase indicating future time............. It existed…… iai ngkoa (4)................... There is……...iai (4)................... Example; The girl [is] a student. The girl is a student. Kain te reirei te teinnaine (5).......................... The boy is being kind E aakoi te teinnimmwaane (6)........................ The building has existed for ten years E a tia n [tei] te auti i nanon tebwina te ririki (7)............ The girl is running quickly.E birimwaaka te teinnaine. ............................. The boy will be handsome E na boto ni mmwaane te teinimmwane.(8).................... The man was a doctor E taokita ngkoa te mmwaane (9).................... I believe in the existence of atoms.I kakoaua bwa [iai] atom. .............. Life exists on earth.[Iai] maan aika a maiu i aonaaba (10)..................... I like being a student.I kukurei bwa kain te reirei ngai. .................... I enjoy living my life.I kukurei ni maiu aei....................... I love him/her with my whole 'Being.' I tangiria i nanou (11) (1) Kiribati has more than 13 segmentary phonemes, though not many more. The northern dialect of the islands of Butaritari and Mwakin, with which I am familiar has six vowels, three front /i, e, ä/ and three back /u, o, a/, any of which can be long or short. There are ten consonants /b,bw, t, k, m, mw, n, ng, w, r/. /bw/ and /mw/ are velarized. The four nasals can be long or short. /s/ should probably be considered a separate phoneme, rather than an allophone of /t/ before /i/ and /u/ or in word-final position, as in the name of the country, which is pronounced "kiribass." /s/ sometimes contrasts with /t/, especially in many English loan-words. For my answers, I use the standard orthography, which doubles vowels and nasals to indicate length and does not distinguish between /a/ and /ä/. (2) I can'hink of a word for "existence," and the dictionaries don't contain one either. There is a word for non-existence, though: akea, an existential verb (see below), which like other verbs takes a possessive suffix when it is the object of another verb. The example Father Sabatier gives in his Dictionnaire Gilbertin-Français is: Tai taekina akean te Atua, 'Ne parle pas de l'inexistence de Dieu.' (3) There are pronoun-like particles that agree with the subject of a verb in person and number, as well as particles to mark tense/aspect, but both must be followed by a predicate. (4) Iai belongs to a small, closed set of existential verbs that differ from the open set of content verbs in that they do not take a particle agreeing with the subject, which is obligatory before other verbs. Sabatier translates iai "il y a." Here is an example from the traditional history of Butaritari and Mwakin: Iai tabeman ake a noora Teatuumateataata n tekateka n te aro aarei, "There were some people who saw Teatuumateataata (the high chief) sitting in this fashion." Other members of the set of existential verbs are akea, "There is/are no (see note (2)), ti "There is/are only," and the interrogative verbs. Ngkoa is an adverb meaning something like "formerly." (5) Since Kiribati lacks a copula, it indicates identity by juxtaposing two noun phrases, the first serving as the predicate. (The normal word order is VOS). Kain te reirei, literally, "a person of the school" means "student." (6) E is the pre-verbal particle that agrees with a third-person singular subject. Aakoi means "is kind, is being kind." (7) The core meaning of tei is "stand," It denotes existence when its subject is an object that can be conceived of as standing, or something that is in force, like a law or a rule. (8) Kiribati does not have a separate category of adjectives as distinguished from verbs; na indicates a non-immediate future action or state. (9) Any content word can function either as a predicate or a subject, depending on its position in the sentence. Taokita is more often used as a noun meaning "doctor," but I've used it grammatically as a verb here. (10) This sentence means literally, "There are living creatures on earth." (11) This sentence consists of I (indicates that the subject is 1st person singular), tangiria, "love him/her" (transitive verb with 3rd person singular object), i nanou "in my mind, soul." There probably exist more romantic ways of saying this. I'm glad to add Kiribati to your collection of non-copulative Austronesian languages. Bernd Lambert. |
