Learn Mando'a

Adding -ness to a word in English transforms the adjective into a noun describing a condition or a measure of quantity.

In the Mando'a dictionary, we have sad, aware, darkness, and new. Aware is a compound and darkness is a separate word. That just leaves sad and new, which both remove their "-la" adjective endings to read as "sadness", and "newness". This means that if we take a word such as "mesh'la" and make it "mesh" it should now read "beautifulness".

But what about adjectives that already derive from nouns? Aru'ela turned into Aru'e is enemy. I propose a new suffix system, -s and -es. Suffix -s for vowel endings and suffix -es for consonant endings. Aru'es would mean hostility. Di'kutes would mean idiocy.

Finally, for consideration, adjectives that are not a noun when shortened. In this example, I will use ge'tal. Instead of removing any letters, we use the -s, -es, system and simply add it onto the end. Ge'tal, red, becomes ge'tales, redness. Nu'kando, weightless, nu'kandos, weightlessness.


Useful? Useless? Incorrect grammar? Incorrect mando'a?
Let me know.

I agree it's a useful construct, however, I think there's an existing precedent for this if you look closely. Some words ending in -an (e.g. buirkan, burcyan) seem to be doing this already.

I always took buirkan as the weight of being a parent, with the kan from kando. As for burcyan, burc'ya is the term for friend, so it's just removing the beten and adding an -n.

I still think that this -an thing is a significant pattern- I can recall it showing up in other places as well. The whole thing brings to mind the preexisting fan system for gerunds (also adding -an)... seeing as Mando'a is intended to be a simplistic language, how this suffix is already prevalent, and how the language does combine parts of speech (adverbs/adjectives), I would be inclined to agree with Vlet.

Can you bring examples?

It doesn't align exactly, but the first thing that comes to mind is 'aran', guard. This comes from 'ara'novor', to guard, and might follow the rule by making use of the conveniently available -an already in the verb.

Ara'novor, to obstruct and defend, more likely comes from haaranovor, which is to hide and conceal. Aran by itself doesn't mean "guard-ness" either, which isn't a word, nor is it "guarding," because that tense doesn't exist in canon Mando'a.

I think this is where it circles back around to the whole ‘Mando’a seems pretty feely’ thing…
(In the sense of being nebulous)

Another thought- for further insight, I looked at how I might convey the -ness suffix if I were to speak freely. The result surprised me somewhat- after a year or two (I've really lost count) of learning and speaking Mando'a, I hadn't thought twice about it. Take the example sentence "The dryness is visible." Without thinking too hard, I translated it as "Haast utre'la." I did it again with a few more examples, with some nouns with more formulaic adjective forms. My conclusion sort of goes back to my point about how some distinct word forms in English are just combined in Mando'a- all I did was use the noun form, no strings attatched. What do you think of this?

There's always a workaround when translating from English into Mando'a, so I agree that this idea I am proposing doesn't need to exist. But that's sort of the case with any noncanonical grammar addition to Mando'a, right?

But for your example, doesn't utrel'a mean unobstructed or empty rather than visible? But assuming that it means 'visible', "dry [is] visible" sounds more like "we can see that it is dry" rather than "how dry it is" because the -ness is to quantify it rather than to describe it after all.

After thinking about it for a while, I have an idea about how this might work. This seems like a situation where the quantity affixes might be used. In Spanish, if you were to say ‘she is sick’ while dropping the subject pronoun, you would get “Está enferma.” Despite the lack of the feminine pronoun, the point that the subject is feminine is gotten across be the default gender system used by the adjective. In this way, you might be able to automatically get more information across you were to default to one of the affixes such as ori’, kih’, ‘ika, etc. Set it up like the Spanish example, where a noun has a specific quality that would not be obvious without an additional grammatical system. I’ll use the example “We can see its dryness” from earlier. ‘Dryness’ is this noun, and in the example situation, let’s assume the dryness is great, that it’s very dry. The latter fact would be conveyed automatically if you were to say ‘Mhi lise haa’taylir bic ori’haast.’ Does that make sense?

Yeah, I get it. So we use some other word to compound it to the noun as a prefix to describe the degree of something. But what about that quantity as a whole and not as a specific? Because, even in your example, it's "we can see that it's very dry" instead of "we can see how dry it is". The -ness ending is to turn the word into a quantifying word, not to set a degree of quantity for something. Weightlessness isn't describing how light it is, but just that it is.

"The gentleness of his words surprised me" is not saying "he is very gentle."

Am I making sense?

I see what you’re saying, but the point of my idea would be that you are forced to give the information. In the Spanish example, you can see how it is impossible to use some adjectives without providing information on the gender of the noun they are altering. Here, your sentence “The gentleness of his words surprised me” doesn’t directly state but implies that his words were gentle. To imply the opposite, the sentence would have to be framed as “The lack of gentleness in his words surprised me” or something to that effect. I assume that a new construct in Mando’a would work either like this or be completely neutral. Either way, using quantitative affixes would force clarity in a way that I can see as more practical in quickly providing a clear description of a situation or location. Are there any benefits to using a more neutral form here that I’m missing?

I guess the argument is that with -ness words in these statements, it's not the adjective stem that your focusing on, but rather a degree of it. It wasn't that it was gentle that was surprising, but that it was less harsh than one expected. If I say "The redness of that was unnerving," I'm implying that I expected it to be somewhat red, but not red to such a degree. We put a level of measurement and description onto it.

You might want to use bid for this, it expresses a similar feeling

e.g. "kaysh nu'bid iviinyc" for "he's not so fast"

Yes, but that would be talking about a specific degree. Not so fast as in he was slow. Slowness would be talking about his speed as a quantifiable whole.