Vadi: Difference between revisions

Vadi is a mildly fusional language with some agglutinative characteristics.  Cliticization is a prominent feature of the language, such that considerable debate has arisen as to whether some affixes should be reclassified as clitics.  Further adding to this debate is the ambiguities arising from the orthography in the texts: a given morpheme may appear as part of a word, and other times may be written as separate and distinct from its target word.  Where the morpheme is written separately from its host, the initial or internal phoneme of the separated morpheme is often represented by a different character from the one usually used when it is attached directly to its host.  This most likely indicates some sort of sandhi process occurred, suggestive of an affixal status, despite being written separately.  Recognizing the clitic-vs-affix debate remains a contested area, this article will again represent the Traditionalist and Šibbūru models.

The School have pointed out that Vadi pronouns also mark for tense, a rather uncommon feature cross-linguistically. These affixes trigger mutation on the pronoun.  The Traditionalists however dispute this finding.

Again, the Šibbūru School argues that a surface reading of the ''Širkattarnaft'' conceals the morphophonotactic processes that indicate these particles, when they appear after the verb root, are actually bound morphemes.  While they agree that verbs most likely do not take tense or aspect markers, they do express other affixes, particularly emphatic, deictic, and mirative markers.  These markers also trigger mutations on the verb.  The Traditionalists, however, disagree with these assessments as well.

The differences between the Traditionalist and the Šibbūru schools are best exemplified by the opposing viewpoints of Schumann and Iyyaħmi. These differences between the two Vadists can be seen in the underlined portions of text in the table below:

#Schumann's analysis shows no gemination.  Compare his reading of /'niku/ versus Iyyaħmi's /'nɪk:u/.  Even within the Traditionalist school, whether Vadi exhibits gemination is hotly debated.  Although the ''Širkattarnaft'' can show gemination with either a character signifying a coda consonant followed by another character of the same consonant in non-coda position, or by using a special diacritic, in practice gemination is not usually shown, save for official correspondence, ceremonial inscriptions, or other highly formal contexts, such as legal documents.  <br/><br/>Gemination in Vadi is inferred by doublets involving a word with no indication of gemination in some texts, while other texts show instances in which that same word appears with a reduplicated syllable.  The reduplicated forms appear in some of the earlier texts, e.g. ''ni-ku-ku'' (see text KS.2017.08.10-B01.01.03.17.b3), then disappear in later texts altogether, e.g. ''ni-ku'' (see text KS.2017.10.09-A01.01.22.43.b8).  Why the Vadi correspondents chose not to use the traditional Minhast methods for showing gemination remain yet unknown.  <br/><br/>The Traditionalists argue the instances of reduplication indicate augmentation or intensity, but the Šibbūru School have criticized this conclusion as it fails to explain why the reduplication occurs in one period only to disappear entirely at a later period.