In the course of my website renovation I added a way to search the dictionary by semantic fields (‘tags’) so as to be able to list words thematically as well. While working on tagging words, I came across yet another bit about Ayeri that’s been annoying me for a longer time: correlative conjunctions, specifically either … or and its negative counterpart neither … nor. According to what is in the dictionary, these are formed as in … in and sing … sing, respectively.

While I don’t think it’s too odd a strategy to introduce both NPs with the same particle, what I now think is kind of stupid is that both in and sing do not occur in any other context and aren’t related to anything else. As particles, they’re not alone in this regard, but as a part of Ayeri’s esthetics, I was trying to keep its system of conjunctions as simple as possible, mostly relying on nay ‘and’, soyang ‘or’ and nārya ‘but, although’. So here are some thoughts on avoiding in and sing, which I haven’t used much in the past anyway.

1. AND

The explicit emphasis of Mary liking both men can be produced by using sano ‘both’ or kamo ‘equal, same’ as an adverb.

2. OR and XOR

Since Ayeri is not supposed to be a loglang, i.e. a logical language, inclusive and exclusive OR are conflated and must be interpreted by the recipient according to context, just like in English and many (most? all?) other natural languages.

The same construction as with nay ‘and’ above can be used here, but with soyang ‘or’. Alternatively, the conjunction can be reduplicated to soyang-soyang, compare naynay ‘and also, furthermore’.

3. NAND and NOR

The constructions here are like their positive counterparts above, but with a negated verb:

The examples so far have only covered objects of transitive verbs, but conjunctions of course may also be used between adjectives, for example, in predicative constructions, which is what we want to deal with in the following paragraphs.

4. AND with predicative adjectives

This is the same as with the object NPs of transitive clauses. However, when emphasizing that both qualities are to be applied to the subject, the verb kama- ‘to be equal, to be as … as’ is used in place of the adverb kamo (or sano, respectively) above:

Note that this is slightly different from adjective comparation – although the same verb kama- is used in that circumstance – in that there is no conjunction between NPs in comparation:

5. OR and XOR with predicative adjectives

Again, the same construction as with regular object NPs is used for simple coordination.

This construction is a little more idiomatic and uses kama- as well, however with soyang ‘or’, not nay ‘and’ in order to express disjunction. The construction with reduplicated soyang does not occur here.

6. NAND and NOR with predicative adjectives

Of course, negation is possible with predicative adjectives as well.

The same strategy as with simple predicative adjectives is used here for negation, compare:

Since there is no verb that the negative suffix -oy can attach to, it is used in its free particle form, voy. For ‘neither … nor’, the following construction can be used in analogy to the positive version above: