Beffa -- April 1, 2021

Regular readers of this metablague know that Dr. M. has resumed his study of Italian. Foolish say some, but heroic say others, because to try to master a language when one is an octogenarian is truly daunting. However, native speakers of English, even older ones, can, if patient, slowly acquire Italian. Its sounds are similar and sometimes identical to those of English; the conjugations, only three of them, are on the whole regular; and many of its words have English or Latin cognates. For me, pronouns present a problem, because they're sometimes required when I wouldn't think to use them, and sometimes dropped when I'd prefer them to be there -- and, moreover, they come in slightly varied direct, indirect, and reflexive forms. And then there are the pronomi combinati or double pronouns which are confusing in themselves and which are sometimes but not always attached to infinitives, gerunds and imperatives as enclitics. It's probably too late in the game for me to become a fluent speaker, but I have hopes of becoming a competent reader. I can now read at about the 6th or 7th grade level; I have the grammar under control so it's mostly a problem of vocabulary and idiom.

For a greater challenge, I've begun to study a little Beffa. Beffa is a Kartvelian language with admixtures of Cascagian and Ghetti. Fortunately for me, there's a small Beffan community here in our town. I work with an introductory textbook -- Pathways to Modern Beffa (2012) by Divino Divano -- and with a native speaker named Ismail Kartakov. We meet three times a week when he's available. Sometimes I enjoy a Beffa-speaking dinner with Ismail and his wife Soraya and their three young children. I've also been to some Beffan parties and exuberant dances. I sometimes feel odd-man-out but it's been fun. The Beffan community, reputedly hostile to outsiders, has been very welcoming. And the goat, mountain oyster, and black radish stew is superb.

Beffa is a bit more complicated than English. For example, while English has 26 consonants, Beffa has 56, including a two kinds of glottal stops that sound almost like clicks as well as a voiced glottal fricative that resembles a cat's purr. It also has both a voiced and unvoiced bilabial trill that sound a lot like an English "raspberry," and an unusual, possibly unique lingual-dental stop in which the tongue is pushed firmly against not the upper but the lower teeth. One peculiarity of Beffa is its consonant clusters -- a word may begin with as many as six consonants yoked together before the first vowel appears. Some words have an initial six consonants followed by a vowel and then a cluster of five or six more consonants. This can be strange to English speakers and sometimes I notice Ismail's younger children giggling at my feeble attempts to replicate their plosives. (Voiceless plosives are usually aspirated and one must take care not to insert a schwa between aspirants.) Beffa also has a varied repertoire of vowels, including a number of diphthongs and a couple of triphthongs. There aren't any tones, thank goodness. There's one triphthong the use of which can be perilous, for if you get it wrong the observation "your blue parrot is pining for the fjords" apparently sounds almost exactly like "my knife is longer and sharper than yours."

Nouns have both natural and grammatical gender. Nouns can be masculine, feminine, neuter, ambiguous, common, animate or inanimate. They can be singular, dual, plural, or paucative (i.e. a few). Neuter nouns rarely have duals. Beffa has six fully formed declensions, distinguished primarily by the fact that plurals in declensions 1 and 3 are formed with a prefix, in 2 and 4 by a suffix, and in 5 and 6 by an infix. There are also some fifteen cases, all useful but some slightly unusual. There are the familiar nominative, possessive, accusative and dative (or indirect object). There are also a series of cases that describe motion: the locative ("the ball that is lying on the ground"), the ablative (("the ball that is coming in your direction"); the separative ("the ball that is moving away from you"); the commitative ("the ball that is touching your hand"); the partitive ("the ball that has left your hand"); the terminative ("the ball that has stopped moving"); the superessive ("the ball that is on top of another ball"); the penetrative ("the ball that is inside another ball"); the perditive ("the ball that is lost"); the oscillative ("the ball that is going back and forth"); the thumpative ("the ball that is bouncing"); the plungitive "the ball that has fallen into the water"); the remunerative ("the ball that has been bought or sold"); the joculatorative ("the ball that does not fall to the ground"); the alfactorative ("the ball that stinks like a corpse"); the perplexive ("the ball that has disappeared"); and the insouciative ("the ball that has disappeared and no one cares"). Nouns can be either proximate or obviative; nouns that are central to the discourse (proximate) are declined very differently than nouns that are of marginal importance (obviative). There is also an unusual suffix (at least, unusual to me, for I had never encountered it before) that indicates whether the object specified touches the earth or is removed from the earth. And an infix which indicates whether the object is horizontal, vertical, diagonal, spiral, or invisible.  

Verbs can be singular dual, plural, paucative, or undetermined: active, passive or middle. There are five fully-formed conjugations and apparently remnants of three others that are retained from the past when the language was more fully synthetic. The most commonly used tenses are present indicative, imperfect indicative, past imperfect indicative, future indicative, future imperfect indicative, future perfect indicative, pluperfect indicative, past pluperfect indicative, future pluperfect indicative, future stative, pluperfect resultative, present optative, future optative, past imperfect optative, present subjunctive, future subjunctive, past pluperfect subjunctive, future pluperfect subjunctive, future pluperfect conditional subjunctive, and future pluperfect optative conditional subjunctive aorist. Curiously, there is no future imperfect subjunctive. Moreover, there are two kinds of vocatives: one when a woman addresses a man; a second when a man addresses a woman or an animal. There is also votive, a tense that was formerly used for addressing the deities in prayer, but is now reserved for tribal chiefs, heads of state or royalty. The votive is very similar to the conditional and the erroneous substitution of a conditional for a votive was formerly grounds for mutilation but nowadays leads only to acute embarrassment, or, in the case of a particularly egregious grammatical lapse, to exile.  

Some verbs are ergative so that the subject of either a transitive or intransitive verb can be in an absolutive case. Some common ergative verbs are "to become," "to eat,", and "to gouge" (as in, "to gouge out the eyes of an enemy").

Beffan script is known as "dabbenaggine." This passage comments on the familiar Beffan proverb, "If you steal my horse, I will steal your wife."

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Beffa used to be written boustrophedonically, but since the reforms of 1912 has been written right to left. For some reason which I cannot possibly imagine, dabbenaggine leaves no spaces between words but runs them all together without breaks, which makes it just slightly harder to master.    

Pronouns and determiners are difficult and complicated and perhaps I'll describe them sometime in the future when I'm more familiar with their multiple and various forms.

Some verbs are ergative so that the subject of either a transitive or intransitive verb can be in an absolutive case. Some common ergative verbs are "to become," "to eat,", and "to gouge" (as in, "to gouge out the eyes of an enemy").

Beffan script is known as "dabbenaggine." This passage comments on the familiar Beffan proverb, "If you steal my horse, I will steal your wife."

.

Beffa used to be written boustrophedonically, but since the reforms of 1912 has been written right to left. For some reason which I cannot possibly imagine, dabbenaggine leaves no spaces between words but runs them all together without breaks, which makes it just slightly harder to master.    

Pronouns and determiners are difficult and complicated and perhaps I'll describe them sometime in the future when I'm more familiar with their multiple and various forms.

Comments

[Don Z. Block]

The Beffans also define a verb as a word in a clause that is capable of showing tense, and they spend the next hour or so answering questions about whether the clause or the verb has that capability. In addition, Beffans have been known to assault Beffans and non-Beffans who insist on defining a verb as an action word.

The New York Times and Will Shortz did not think this April 1st was worthy of a 4/1/21 puzzle, possibly because so many people still think the puzzle disappeared several years ago after an April 1 puzzle had a lengthy answer that announced that money problems would be causing the termination of the crossword puzzle feature.

When I was teaching face to face many, many years ago,on April 1st, I would send a colleague into my classroom to announce I would not be there that day, then walk in as the students were about to leave.

Another April Fool's joke in my school was written by a colleague, who, after lamenting what he saw as discrimination against the dead, announced a new course for the terminally impaired, complete with rubrics and outcomes.

[vivian de st vrain]

Vivian replies: I don't know what's meant by "double nagging."

[Lyn Innes]

Here’s hoping for a beffa world but perhaps we could do without the double nagging.
April 1st is my favourite day. On which I regularly read Louis MacNeice’s lovely poem written for that date.