Dapiica: Locatives and Aspiration
Aspiration
Aspiration, for my non-linguist readers, is a phonetic feature of consonants - you breathe out a puff of air as you pronounce the sound. In English, this isn’t phonemic - English speakers consider [pʰ] (aspirated p) and [p] to be the same sound. You can hear the difference if you pronounce “percent” [pʰeːsɛnt] and then “super” [sʉpə].
Allophones like this always occur in predictable ways - in English, /p/ is pronounced [pʰ] at the start of a word, and [p] elsewhere.
Thus far, I’ve been considering them to be allophonic in dapiica as well, but what I haven’t decided is where a sound is aspirated, and where it’s not.
Locatives
In English, we have prepositions and Prepositional Phrases. For example, in the phrase “she’s at the potionmaker’s home”, at the potionmaker’s home is a Prepositional Phrase, indicating where she is. at is the preposition, and is called a preposition becuase it comes before the position.
In Dapiica, we have circumpositions - instead of being before the position, they surround the position.
Since they are attached to roots instead of existing as seperate words, linguists prefer to call these “Locatives” [citation needed].
The first locative to talk about is the “at” locative (also known as “the Locative”, somewhat confusingly):
ŋiiŋ dinadacaʃtip’aβguβiʃdonoba
ŋii -ŋ dina- da- caʃti- p’a -β -gu- βiʃ -don -oba
COP.CIRC -3PROX LOC.CIRC- NMZ- potion- make -PERSON -POSS- home -LOC.CIRC -COP.CIRC
“They are at the potionmaker’s home”
As you can see, it can get a bit lengthy!
For more details, check out the prepositions section on the dapiica page.