Okuna text
Ku alimalhna es ytlane sihkunume oke iaipa. Ku sihilalme nkeltintoi lehua. Keltintai, ikoi hofè pohua elh
ku katsypa hok!
Ku sihkunu iontsume hepi lehua. Sihkunò ytlana: Itan hepasihe mamimilho, tluosna ilal tlina! Suhalau
mpehkaime uhyle, sihilalu su sihilail sikà es ilitle tionma sehtaut tuma. Ku tionme usute untane klohi
lehua. Hofè tionme keltintai, hi pohua.
Ku tionme uklohe, amai siehpa na! Kue imà tlotonin mian kaupiheia siehpa: ksohme ka liatsyipe tokotoua,
ilitle tion tsanieia, nitlkaka oisemita—Ke tlotonin imume klohi lehua hok ikoi!
Smooth English translation
At the outset, you will be floating on a strange river. You should not touch the bank of the river.
Touching it, your bubble will burst and you will drown!
You should move along the centre of the river. The river is peculiar: Its current does not
meander, but its banks are straight! Having passed the first outlet, a spinning gate blocks
movement from one bank of the river to the other. You should move through the gate slowly in
a circle. If the bubble touches the gate, it will burst.
After going through the gate, write to me! I will write to you about further dangers: About the
dark and submerged mansion, about the two spinning gates acting as one, about the stinging
swarms of bees—You should go through all these dangers!
Grammar notes
Word order
Okuna clauses have somewhat free word order, although there’s a strong tendency for the verb
to come at the end. Within noun phrases, modifiers (possessors, relative clauses) all precede the
head noun, while quantifiers (‘all’, ‘some’, etc.) and words indicating position in a sequence
(‘the first one’, ‘the next one’, ‘the preceding one’, etc.) follow the noun. Noun phrases are
marked for case, with the case marker attaching to the last word of the noun phrase.
Noun phrase morphology
Nouns do not inflect for singular or plural (e.g., kotu means ‘house’ or ‘houses’, according to
content). However, there is a suffix –mit for forming nouns that indicate a collectivity (kotu-mit
‘group(s) of houses’). There is also an augmentative prefix to- which indicates large size/scale
(e.g., to-kotu ‘big house(s)’).
As noted above, noun phrases inflect for case. Case marking patterns in Okuna are extremely
complex, based in part on semantics and in part on the aspect/mood of the verb. All eight case
forms occur in the above text:
(1) The unmarked form: Generally used for indefinite objects which are either non-referential or
refer to entities which are not salient in the discourse. Unmarked nouns also modify other
nouns.
(2) Nominative case: Used for subjects of most stative verbs (‘be tall’), subjects of intransitive
motion verbs (‘go along’), and objects of transitive motion verbs (‘carry, give’), among other
roles. Nominative case is marked by the suffix –e when the stem ends in a consonant (e.g., kal-e
‘man-NOM’). When the stem ends in a vowel, the stress shifts to that vowel; and if the vowel is
high, it lowers to become a mid vowel (e.g., ike ‘dog’ > ikè ‘dog.NOM’; pilu ‘bird’ > pilò
‘bird.NOM’).
(3) Ergative case: Used for agentive subjects of transitive verbs. The ergative case is normally
marked by the suffix –ma.
(4) Dative case: Used for goals/recipients of motion verbs (e.g., ‘house’ in ‘go to the house’,
‘woman’ in ‘give the book to the woman’), as well as the patients of many change-of-state verbs
(e.g., ‘hit’). In the above text, dative case is marked by the infix –i-, inserted before the final
vowel of the stem (e.g., kal ‘man’ > kail ‘man.DAT’).
(5) Instrumental case: Used to mark instruments, paths, and to express manner or accompaniment (making it equivalent to English ‘with’, ‘by way/means of’, ‘through’, ‘across’, ‘via’, etc.).
Instrumental case is marked by the suffix –me.
(6) Locative case: Used to indicate location in space or time, among other relations, and marked
by the suffix –na.
(7) Ablative case: Used to indicate source (‘from’), among other things, marked by the suffix –u.
(8) Allative case: Used to indicate the beneficiary (‘for’) of an action, or the alienable possessor
of a noun, among other relations. Allative case is also used with verbs of cognition or communication (‘say’, ‘think’, ‘write’) to indicate the subject matter, in which case it corresponds to
English ‘about’. Allative case is marked by the suffix –a, which causes glide insertion and
lowering of a final high vowel (e.g., ike ‘dog’ > ikeia ‘dog.ALL’; pilu ‘bird’ > piloua ‘bird.ALL’).
Noun modification
Noun-noun compounds are very common in Okuna. There are no adjectives in this language;
instead properties and relations are expressed by verbs (e.g., pata ‘be tall’). When it is used to
modify a noun, a verb is first converted into a derived noun (e.g., pata > pate ‘tall one, tall thing’)
and then juxtaposed with the noun being modified to form a kind of compound (e.g., pate kotu
‘tall house’, literally ‘tall-thing house’). There are two types of noun derivation found in this
text: Roughly speaking, nouns formed with the suffix –e indicate an entity which possesses the
property or undergoes the action named by the verb (e.g., hafa ‘be new’ > haf-e ‘thing which is
new’; ekpa ‘carry’ > ekp-e ‘thing which is carried’). Nouns formed by adding –ka indicate the
agent of the action (e.g., siehpa ‘write’ > siehpa-ka ‘writer, one who writes’). In addition to
modification, Okuna also uses noun compounding to express relations which in other
languages are expressed by prepositions or postpositions (e.g., kotu epam-na ‘on top of the
house’ is literally ‘house top-LOC’).
Verb morphology
Verbs inflect for a number of categories: tense, aspect, mood (indicative versus subjunctive),
polarity (positive versus negative), and others. The unmarked form of the verb ends in –a. This
form is used to express habitual/generic events or future events (in the latter case optionally
accompanied by the future particle oke). The prefix i- is added to indicate progressive aspect,
while the prefix u- is added to indicate perfect aspect (e.g., siehpa ‘writes’ or ‘will write’; i-siehpa
‘is writing’; u-siehpa ‘has written’). There are also past tense forms (imperfective and perfective)
and conditional forms, but these don’t occur in the text.
Negation is expressed by changing the ending on the verb and adding the prefix m- (e.g., pata ‘is
tall’ > m-pat-o ‘is not tall’). When m- precedes a consonant, it often assimilates to n- or changes to
ma- (e.g., kesta ‘is happy’ > n-kest-o ‘is not happy’; muelha ‘sleeps’ > ma-muelh-o ‘doesn’t sleep’).
Embedded clauses are formed by changing the ending on the verb. The following endings occur
in the text: The suffix -i marks the dependent subjunctive, which is often equivalent to the
English infinitive (e.g., siehp-i ‘to write’ or ‘that X would write’). When the dependent
subjunctive verb is negated, –i changes to –oi. The suffix –e (not to be confused with the
nominalizing suffix –e discussed above) forms indicative participles, and can co-occur with the
aspectual prefixes (e.g., siehp-e ‘when X writes’, i-siehp-e ‘while writing, while X is/was writing’,
u-siehp-e ‘having written, once X has/had written’). The suffix -e is also added to a verb that
modifies another verb, e.g. by indicating the means or manner by which an event is carried out
(e.g., kiota ‘be fast’ > kiot-e siehpa ‘write fast’; ianta ‘jump’ > iant-e lhyua ‘enter by means of
jumping’ or ‘jump into’). Finally, the suffix –ai is the subjunctive counterpart of –e, and indicates
hypothetical contingent events; subjunctive participles function much as ‘if’ clauses do in
English (e.g., siehp-ai ‘if X writes, supposing that X writes’).
Glossary
aipa [v] float, drift (through the air, or on the surface of the water)
amai [pn] (1st person singular dative pronoun)
alimalh [n] beginning, starting point, outset
elh [cj] and then, and so
es [pt] one, a(n), a certain
hepa [v] go along, follow
hepasih [n] current, stream, flow
hofi [n] bubble
hok [pt] (emphatic particle)
hyla [v] pass, move past
ikoi [pn] (2nd person singular allative pronoun)
ilal [n] shore, bank
imà [pn] (1st person singular ergative pronoun)
imume [pn] all of them (3rd person inanimate instrumental form of ‘all’)
iontsu [n] middle, centre, midst
itan [pn] (3rd person singular inanimate locative pronoun)
ka [cj] and
katsypa [v] drown
kaupihe [n] next one, following one
ke [pt] this/these, the just-mentioned
keltima [v] touch, be touching, be in contact, be adjacent
keltinta [v] begin to touch, come into contact
kloha [v] go through
kotu [n] house
ksohma [v] be dark, be in darkness (not illuminated)
ku [pn] (2nd person singular nominative pronoun)
kue [pn] (2nd person singular dative pronoun)
lehua [v] should, ought to
liatsyipa [v] be sunken, submerged, deep below the surface of the water
litla [v] spin, twirl
mian [n] some, a little (can also be used to express plurality)
mimilha [v] meander, move back and forth, move in a serpentine fashion
mpehkai [n] first one
na [pt] (particle marking optative/imperative mood)
nitlka [v] sting
oise [n] bee
oke [pt] (particle indicating future tense)
pohua [v] burst, rupture
sehtaut [n] progress, forward direction, forward motion
siehpa [v] write
sihilal [n] river bank, edge of a stream
sihkunu [n] stream, river
su [pt] X su Y sikà = stretching all the way from X to Y
suhalau [n] outlet, way out, path leading away from something
tion [n] gate
tlina [v] be straight (not warped or curved)
tlotonin [n] danger, hazard, risk
tluosna [pt] instead of that, rather than that
tsanie [n] pair, couple, twosome
tuma [v] block, obstruct, bar
untana [v] circle, move in a circular motion, follow a curved path
usuta [v] be slow, move slowly
ytlana [v] be strange, odd, peculiar, noteworthy, distinctive