Harākti: Difference between revisions

There are several moods in Harākti: indicative, imperative, conditional, optative and reputative (sometimes called optative-conditional or even subjunctive but reputative is preferred to avoid confusion). The indicative and imperative moods are inherited directly from Proto-Indo-European; the other moods are a later development within the language itself. However, unlike the PIE imperative, in Harākti there are forms for all three persons (and numbers, of course). In the 1st person the meaning is usually something along the lines of ''let me'' or ''let's''. The 3rd person forms are usually used when reporting imperative (a use that overlaps with 3rd person optative). The conditional is used in conditional sentences where it is used both in the conditional clause (the if-clause) and the main clause. It is also often used in other environments and it often overlaps with the subjunctive in English. The optative variously corresponds to English ''let'', ''may'', ''shall'' or ''should'', or the subjunctive in certain contexts. The third mood, reputative, is used to convey the meaning of ''to be supposed to'' or ''should'' in certain contexts.  

Since Proto-Indo-European has not yet evolved traditional suffixes for subjunctive and optative by the time of the language split (Middle PIE), the language lacks inflectionally formed moods other than the indicative and imperative. The language has, however, either independently or under the influence of surrounding languages, developed its own system. The conditional, optative and reputative are formed periphrastically by combining a particle and the indicative. The conditional is formed with the particle '''mān''', which appears to have been borrowed from Hittite ''mān'' (meaning 'if'), the optative is formed with an ablauted version of the same particle: '''mēn''', and the reputative is formed with the particle '''kān'''. The origin of the latter is unknown but it has been suggested that it originated from the Hittite clitic ''-kan''.