changes in modal words

I have finally decided to go back to the original Katanda-style modals, namely, one classifier for all epistemic modalities and one for all deontic modalities. I chose a modifier for each modality (except Possibility and Obligation, which are still defaults) that is somewhat related to the modality.

 

Here are the old classifiers and the new classifier-modality combinations:

Epistemic modalities

    yo'a  >  yo ha  Evidentiality

    yo'aw > yo gu  Hedge

    yo'ay >  yo ve  Reasonableness

    yo'e  >  yo fra  Counterfactual

    yo'i   >  yo fo   Acceptability

    yo'o  >  yo xe  Significance

    yo'u  >  yo jru  Inevitability

 

Deontic modalities

    yu'a  >  yu fe   Necessity

    yu'e  >  yu xli  Consequentiality

    yu'i   >  yu te  Appropriateness (recently added)

 

Changing these roots in this way

1) allows all the modalities to have either one or the other of the modal classifiers, and thereby show more directly their commonality,

2) allows much more flexibility and freedom to choose roots when new modalities are discovered since there are many more modifiers than vowels,

3) requires in most cases no more syllables and zero or one more letters, so the resulting words are only slightly longer at most.

4) there is more variety in the resulting words so that they don't all sound the same.

5) the resulting words, due to the modifier being chosen for its mnemonic value, should be easier to remember and make more sense than the arbitrary vowel assignments that existed before.

 

stevo