Zompist Bboard Again

Savun salagunu
sɑ.vʌn sɑlɑ.gʌ.nʌ
savu-n sala-gunu
3rdPerson-agreement(with prox./nonpres.) pain-proximate/nonpresent
I was thinking that it arose from their holding that ailments are sent to them & inflicted upon them by their enemies - naturally, you wouldn't know who sent it, so it'd remain singular rather than plural.

...but while my original thought had been to use "Nonpresent" since the inflictor wouldn't be in sight while I talk about my pain with you...but then I wondered if "Proximate" would be better, given that the pain is physically closer to me than you are

Suggestions welcome; thank you!




{disclaimer: it may be my eyes are failing me, but i checked the first five pages of this forum & couldn't find the Quick Questions thread}

I don't really know what's going on here, but it seems you're asking us if it's realistic to mark this with a proximate enclitic/suffix or a non-visible one.

If you want to use 'pain' with the non-visible marker, are you marking the inflictors with the suffix? That is, pain-3.NONVISB = 'their pain', i.e. 'the pain he/she/they inflicted'? This seems pretty different from proximate marking, which usually means 'this pain' (as your explanation suggests, close to the speaker). I mean, the two meanings are really unrelated one to the other. You could even have "this pain of theirs", i.e. "this pain that they caused", using both a proximate marker and that kind-of-genitive 3rd person marker.