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Negative conditional -aattaa

The negatives of the conditional are formed by the addition of a negative morpheme È¥¥ -aatt- to the INFINITIVE (the usual rule) followed by the conditional morpheme È(§) -aa(l). In some dialects, the form is 鴆 aatti instead of È¥¹Ô -aattaa

A morphophonemic rule reduces vowel sequences -aa to a, i.e., ÂÀ + È¥¹Ô vara + aattaa becomes varaattaa. Modals and defective verbs can also have negative conditionals.

ؽԴåÜ¿Ô¥¹Ô pooha-mudiyaattaa `If (one) can not go'

The syntactic version of the negative conditional is more common in ST than the morphological, however. This consists of embedding a negatively-marked verb before ýºÔ nnaa, rather than `negativizing' ýá nnu:





Harold_F.Schiffman