Idea: pat turns a verb and its stuff into a noun

E.g., kiro ma pat kaminar would have an implied su, so with all the syntactic sugar removed it's kiro ta ma su pat kaminar ta ma, or "I want the action of me walking"

I think this woud clear up a lot of confusing cases

Since a separate verb and its nouns/adverbs can't really be used as a subject, I think pat having an implied su instead of ta would keep things "backwards compatible"

@DLosc What do you think about this?

Hmmm

In one sense, it doesn't really make a difference (unless someone's going to start saying [verb] su pat... because "well, pat makes it a noun")--it's the same sentence, just a different way of describing it.

@RadvylfPrograms Technically, a "that" clause can be used as a subject in English: "That you disagree makes me sad." We just don't prefer to have such a complex subject, so we usually rephrase it using clefting: "It makes me sad that you disagree."

I think, in Katlani, we've just been using pat to insert a content clause after a verb that could otherwise take a noun as a direct object, so it would be essentially equivalent to say "These verbs can take a pat clause instead of a direct object" OR "These verbs can take a pat clause as a direct object; pat does not need su before it."

I like the second more

So I'll use that in my tutorial

I guess if you're going to say pat is a straight-up nominalizer, that raises the question of whether the resulting "noun phrase" could be used in other places nouns are used.

I think it should be

Do you have an example offhand? I'm trying to come up with one

hada su ynii tsaku maki ta pat srik ka su niny asi ktaf: You writing that book says a lot about people

We really need a better plural for y, I've been using yni since yi is hard to pronounce

@RadvylfPrograms Okay, then yni is the plural. Done. ;)

I'm just worried it'll be a little janky, since that sort of creates the word yn (or adds irregularity)

Oh, using it witn prepositions could be a good example of other uses for pat

hada tsaku pat ktom: To talk about eating

@RadvylfPrograms Options: 1) Change y to yn; 2) treat y as an abbreviated form of yn; 3) little words are often irregular, embrace the irregularity

What if the plural of y was yy

ಠ_ಠ

I think that's strictly worse than yni: harder to distinguish from plain y, still irregular, and in a sense more irregular since it doesn't use -i for plural

(Speaking of which, one thing I don't thing we've ever once discussed is double letters. We've got some of them in the vocab, but are those pronounced twice as long? Is that part of our phonology?)

Maybe we should just make a new word for "thing" that doesn't end in y

Is a taken?

Hmm, it is

How about zo?

I really like a...

I wonder if we could just change and to av

If we're changing long-established words, I kinda want to change "cat" to something longer than o. :P It's amusing to have a very short word for "cat," but I always find that my brain expects o to be a grammar word rather than a content word, which makes it difficult to parse a sentence about a cat.