31st Lexember Word

etíku [e̞ˈd͡ʑiˑɡʊ̆], intransitive verb: “to be/become new”

For this last day of Lexember 2017, and last day of 2017 itself, I tried to be at least slightly on topic :-).

Etíku refers to to things and concepts that are new, i.e. newly created or newly conceived. It can only be used of things and concepts, not of people or animals, except as a short cut (for instance, you would use etíku to refer to someone as a “new friend”, because the new thing in that case is not the person itself, but your friendship with them, and friendship is a concept).

A peculiarity of etíku is that it has what I call a “fragile vowel”. Simply put, its last, unstressed vowel u gets elided when various suffixes and clitics are added to the verb, even when one wouldn’t expect it to disappear according to the phonotactic rules of Haotyétpi (or its many sandhi rules). In other words, while etíku appears as such when used on its own, when suffixes and clitics are involved, the actual stem of this verb is etík.

So that’s it for Lexember 2017. I hope you enjoyed my additions to the Haotyétpi language. I know I had fun coining these words, and they’ve made me think really hard about the culture underlying this language. Don’t hesitate to comment or ask questions about the words I created this month, and see you again next Lexember!

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30th Lexember Word

ompáw [o̞mˈbä͡ʊ], alienably possessed positional: “earlier moment, earlier time; beforehand”

To expand on yesterday’s renás, we now have its opposite. While renás refers to a moment later in time than the time that is relevant to the conversation, ompáw refers to a moment earlier than that time.

Apart from that difference in meaning, ompáw behaves pretty much in the same way as renás. It’s also a positional, meaning it can be used adverbially to mean “before that time, beforehand”.

An interesting use of renás and ompáw is as modifiers of other nouns referring to moments in time. This is done first by adding the copula -(s)e to these nouns (yes, in Haotyétpi, the copula is a suffix), and then using the result as a relative clause completing another noun. When doing so, we get renáse, which in this context means “following” or “next”, and ompáwse, which means in this case “previous” or “last”. For instance, with nów: “month”, we can form renáse nów ta: “next month”, and ompáwse nów ta: “last month” (=ta is mandatory here, as nów is not a positional). It’s an interesting usage, and a pattern that is found in various places in Haotyétpi.

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29th Lexember Word

renás [ɾe̞ˈnäˑɕ], alienably possessed positional: “later moment, later time; afterwards”

Now for something completely different! Or, in this case, not “now”, but “later” :-P. Simply put, renás is a noun that refers to a moment in time later than whatever moment in time is relevant at this point in the conversation. That moment can be “now”, but it can also be some point of time in the past or the future. It doesn’t matter when the relevant moment in time is, renás refers to a time after it.

A peculiarity of renás is that it is a positional. Positionals are a subtype of nouns that usually refer to locations, in space or time, and have a somewhat different behaviour from normal nouns regarding the use of locative particles. In particular, when they are used with the plain locative particle =ta (“at, on, in”), that particle can actually be omitted. Effectively, this means such nouns can be used as is with an adverbial meaning of “at + location”. Examples of such nouns are ciéke (“house” -> ciékun: “at home”, literally “(at) my house”) and ké (“day” -> kaam ké: “today”, literally “this day”). That’s why renás can be used on its own to mean “afterwards”, i.e. literally “(at) a later time”. It’s not wrong to say renás ta, but it’s felt as redundant and thus would only be used to be emphatic.

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28th Lexember Word

yakisú [jäd͡ʑɪˈzuˑ], transitive verb: “to hurt (s.o. or sthg)”

As I explained yesterday, akimés can mean “to hurt”, but only in its intransitive sense. In Haotyétpi, valency is an important property of a verb, and a verb cannot usually change valency without an explicit voice affix being added to it. This is very different to English, where many verbs can be used transitively and intransitively without a single morphological change.

So akimés can only be used to mean “to hurt” in the sense of “my foot hurts”. If you’d rather say “I hurt my foot”, you need to use another verb, in this case yakisú.

Yakisú is used when it’s the object that is in pain (and that object can be a person or a body part, basically like the subject of akimés), and the subject is the cause of that pain (or its unwitting facilitator, as it often enough happens :-P).

In terms of morphology, yakisú is formed using the verb-forming suffix -su, basically the opposite of -mes (-mes marks attachment, -su marks emission). The y- prefix it also sports is common in verbs that refer to a sensation or a feeling, or verbs referring to the workings of one’s brains (like yortamés: “to remember” and yortasú: “to suppose”). It originates from an applicative voice prefix that isn’t productive anymore.

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27th Lexember Word

akimés [äd͡ʑɪˈmëːɕ], intransitive verb: “to hurt, to be painful, to be in pain”

Expanding on yesterday’s noun, we now have the associated verb. In terms of morphology, this verb is formed like urmés, with the -mes verb-forming suffix. To explain its shape, either -mes was added to akíhi which lost its last, unstressed syllable as a result (a likely outcome: syllables in direct post-stress position are very weak in Haotyétpi), or -mes was added directly to the interjection akí (not as unlikely as one might think). It’s not possible to rule out either of these origins. This uncertainty does not change anything about the meaning of this verb though.

Akimés is an intransitive, stative verb, referring to the state of pain (or, in a more dynamic meaning, referring to reaching that state). Its subject is always either the person experiencing pain, or the specific body part that hurts them. It cannot be used in the transitive sense of “to hurt (s.o.)”. We’ll see how that is done tomorrow :-).

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26th Lexember Word

akíhi [äˈd͡ʑiˑʝɪ̆], alienably possessed noun: “pain”

So, while this may not be a very Christmas-y kind of word (here in the Netherlands we celebrate Boxing Day as “2nd Christmas Day”, so it’ll still be Christmas here when this post is published :-)), my shoulder is killing me as I am typing this, and my husband had to have a tooth extracted yesterday, so I really couldn’t think of any other word to coin.

Quite simply, akíhi refers to the very disagreeable sensation one gets when hurt. In principle, it refers to physical pain only, and the word is probably of onomatopoeic origin: the cry of pain that is transcribed as “ouch” or “ow” in English is akí or akkí in Haotyétpi.

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25th Lexember Word

eów [e̞ˈo̞͡ʊ], intransitive verb: “to be/become white”

I already knew of the verb réy, which refers to both lack of colour (“to be/become black”) and lack of light (“to be/become dark”). Moreover, I already knew that verb has an antonym: murí. However, murí is the opposite of réy only in the “light” sense, not in the “colour” sense. In other words, murí strictly means “to be/become bright/light”, and not “to be/become white”. So réy had to have another opposite for the “colour” sense. And I finally found it: eów.

Just like murí opposes réy on the “light-dark” scale, eów opposes réy on the “white-black” scale.

Notice that eów is never used to refer to a skin colour, except maybe for corpses and people with skin diseases. The Mountain Folk themselves do not have what people in Europe and the US would consider “white” skin anyway.

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24th Lexember Word

urmésko [uɾˈme̞ˑɕkə̆], nominalisation: “named person, child, boy, girl, teenager”

So far we’ve been so busy talking about namelessness and how nameless children are referred to despite their namelessness that we haven’t talked about what happens afterwards, when they have actually been named. How do you refer to them once that’s happened?

Now, we’ve seen that for nameless children, we have words like turáppo, ussáppo (rarely), and things I’ve not mentioned yet like poyá (“child”, i.e. offspring of someone), hóm (“son”) or tán (“daughter”). For adults (i.e. people who have come of age), kár (“person”) does nicely, or more rarely urák (“human being”, used to refer to Mountain Folk only). But for people that have received a name but haven’t yet come of age (i.e. between the ages of about 3 to about 16), the Mountain Folk prefer not to use any of the options I just gave:

• Ussáppo is just not valid anymore for named children, and it is insulting;
• Turáppo is only usable for nameless children, except in certain specific contexts (it could still find its way on school reports for instance :-) );
• Poyá, hóm and tán simply feel too “childish” to be used on children older than 3, except when the speaker is a parent of the child in question;
• Kár and urák, on the other hand, feel too “adult” to be used on children that have yet to undergo their coming of age ceremony.

So, what’s a good Haotyétpi speaker to do in this situation? In this case, a common way is, rather boringly, to use the nominalisation of urmés. And indeed, urmésko (“one who is named”) has become so associated with children and teenagers that it’s never used of adults, despite the fact that adults have names as well.

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23rd Lexember Word

turáppo [tuˈɾäˑpːə̆], nominalisation: “baby, nameless child”

As I mentioned before, the “logical” way to refer to a nameless child or baby, i.e. the word ussáppo, has taken on such a negative connotation that it’s hardly ever used that way anymore. But people still need a way to refer to babies, don’t they? How can they do so?

That’s where turáppo comes in. When a serviceable word becomes so pejorative that it cannot be used in its original sense anymore, people will either start extending another word to cover that sense, or create a new way to refer to that sense. In this case, the Haotyétpi speakers chose the second method. They started referring to unnamed children as turáppo, which is the nominalisation of turáp, a verb which when used intransitively means “to be able to be, to be able to exist” (it’s the potential form of ás: “to be, to exist”). In other words, it means “one that can be, one that can exist, one that has potential”.

This way of referring to children goes very well with the Mountain Folk point of view that nameless children have the potential to be many things, hence they shouldn’t hastily be given a name that may not fit what they are going to become. Also, it is a very positive way of referring to someone, even if that person were to be an adult, so there is little chance that the word will get a negative connotation anytime soon.

Because of that, the use of turáppo has spread among the Haotyétpi speaking community quite fast, despite it being a relatively recent coinage (at least when used in that sense), and is now the standard way of referring to babies or nameless children. It is, however, never used as a temporary name for nameless children. The main reason is probably the very positive connotation this word brings, which clashes with the strong tradition to use words with negative connotations to call nameless children.

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22nd Lexember Word

ussáp ortáse [uˈsːäˑp o̞ɾˈtäˑʑə̆], noun phrase: “nameless god(s)/spirit(s)“

These last few days, I’ve kept mentioning these “malevolent spirits” that could discover and attack children if they were given a name too early. As it happens, the Mountain Folk have a generic name for these spirits, so I might as well mention it. In Haotyétpi, these spirits are called ussáp ortáse, i.e. “nameless spirits” or “nameless gods” (the traditional Mountain Folk animist religion does not really make a distinction between spirits and gods).

According to tradition, these “nameless gods” are spirits that for some reason lost their names. Either they got their names stolen by other spirits, or they lost them to an unnaming ceremony performed by human beings (according to Mountain Folk beliefs, the spirits must be respected and honoured to maintain balance in the world, but that respect must go both ways, and humans are entitled to punish spirits for not doing their part of the bargain), or they simply lost them to carelessness or wickedness. As I mentioned before, names have power in Mountain Folk beliefs, and for a spirit losing one’s name is equivalent to losing most of one’s identity. The god loses form, purpose and even most of its capacity to reason (if it had any) and becomes a formless, wandering spirit that yearns only one thing: to fill in the gap left by its lost name. Such spirits tend then to aggregate and will try to attack other spirits or even humans to steal them their strength, their health, their turá, even their name if they can.

The effect on people, according to traditional Mountain Folk beliefs, is diseases, i.e. the ussáp ortáse were traditionally considered to be the main cause of diseases, hence the need to ward people, especially young children and babies, against such spirits.

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21st Lexember Word

ussáppo [uˈsːäˑpːə̆], nominalisation: “baby, nameless child; moron“

Today’s word is a simple nominalisation of yesterday’s ussáp, using the nominalising suffix -ko which assimilates to -po after p.

As I mentioned yesterday, ussáp is used more and more to indicate stupidity and less and less to indicate actual namelessness (although that meaning hasn’t disappeared entirely). In the case of ussáppo, that semantic shift has gone even further, and whenever it is used it’s mostly as an insult meaning “moron”. In any case, it’s never used to refer to babies or nameless children in general.

The only times when ussáppo is actually used in its original meaning is as a temporary name to refer to a specific nameless child. As I explained before, nameless children are referred to in various ways when needed, and just calling a child ussáppo is a common way to do so. This usage persists despite, but also probably because of the overwhelmingly negative connotations that this word has taken. As I wrote before, using words referring to unattractive things (or with negative connotations) to refer to nameless children is believed to protect them against malevolent spirits, as those spirits will only attack children that have something worth stealing (strength, intelligence, and other positive characteristics). By using insulting words to refer to nameless children, the Mountain Folk believe they can fool spirits into thinking they are not worth attacking.

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20th Lexember Word

ussáp [uˈsːäˑp], intransitive verb: “to lack a name, to be nameless; to be stupid“

Carrying on within the same semantic field, we now have the opposite of yesterday’s urmés.

As we saw yesterday, namelessness can be used as a way to imply stupidity (since only very young children are nameless, saying that of an adult implies that they never left that stage in their development). This is especially true of today’s verb ussáp. While it can still be used to refer to the state of children before the naming ceremony, it is much more commonly used to mean “to be stupid”, and most Haotyétpi speakers will understand it that way unless it is made very explicit that one is talking about a nameless child.

In fact, it seems that the use of ussáp as an insult is currently in the process of taking over from its more literal meaning, especially in the younger generations, and many Haotyétpi speakers already feel uncomfortable using it in that latter sense, even when the context is clear. And as we’ll see tomorrow, this particular shift is even more pronounced with another word.

In terms of morphology, ussáp is simply the root of usé, together with the verb-forming suffix -sap: “to lack, -less“.

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19th Lexember Word

urmés [uɾˈme̞ˑɕ], intransitive verb: “to be/become named, to have/receive a name”

As I explained yesterday, names are very important in traditional Mountain Folk culture, And children spend quite a few years nameless, only receiving a name when they are three to four years old. The naming ceremony is one of the most important ceremonies in one’s life in their culture, and the fact that one has got a name is an important enough characteristic that urmés is a relatively common word to use in Haotyétpi.

Urmés really simply means: “to have/receive a name”, i.e. “to undergo the naming ceremony” (dynamic meaning) or “to have undergone the naming ceremony” (static meaning). What it doesn’t mean is “to be called”, i.e. it cannot be used to ask about someone’s name. That is done using the expressions =ku ayét (=ku is a quotative clitic, and ayét is the antipassive of yét: “to say, to tell”).

In terms of morphology, urmés is formed by using the root of yesterday’s noun usé, together with the verb-forming suffix -mes, which is used to form verbs that indicate that something is attached (literally or metaphorically) to something else. The change from s to r is due to sandhi, as s always changes before a nasal stop. Although in this case the sandhi is slightly irregular, as normally s fully assimilates before a nasal, so we would have expected the verb to be *ummés. And indeed, some Haotyétpi dialects have ummés. But the most common form of this verb is urmés, so it’s the one I use here.

An interesting use of urmés is that since being unnamed is a mark of someone being a baby or a very young child, accusing an adult of being unnamed is saying that they have the intelligence of such a young child, i.e. they’re an idiot! Hence the following question, which when used by a Haotyétpi speaker sounds pretty much like “what are you, 12?” when used by an English speaker:

Inurmés hure n’ ás?: “Are you (even) named?”

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18th Lexember Word

usé [uˈʑe̞ˑ], inalienably possessed noun: “(one’s) name”

And now for something completely different, we start today with a series of words having to do with a major area of Mountain Folk culture: naming.

For the Mountain Folk, names are serious business. Names have power, especially people’s names. They hold meaning, and meaning can influence reality. Also, according to the Mountain Folk beliefs, names are what make humans visible to spirits, despite the spirit world and the human world being separate. Nameless people (or rather, people not named according to Mountain Folk tradition through a naming ceremony) are effectively invisible to all spirits, be they benevolent or malevolent. These two properties of names are the reason children of Mountain Folk are kept nameless until they are about three to four years old:

• An ill-chosen name that does not fit the nature of a child could stump its development and even cause it a great deal of harm, so the Mountain Folk wait until the child starts to develop an own personality before giving it a name that describes it properly;
• Babies and young children haven’t had time to build up a resistance against attacks from malevolent spirits (a main cause of diseases according to old Mountain Folk beliefs), nor have they had time to undergo the various ceremonies meant to protect them. For this reason, keeping them nameless ensures malevolent spirits cannot target them.

Nameless children are referred to in a variety of ways, and adults must actually take care of not calling children using the same word or expression more than twice in a row, as it is believed that a word or expression used three times in a row to refer to a child effectively becomes its name. There are, luckily, unnaming ceremonies meant to undo such accidental namings, and using words referring to unattractive things (like excrements!) can keep malevolent spirits at bay, at least until such a ceremony can be performed.

But back to the word itself: as one might expect, usé is an inalienably possessed noun, that is, a noun with a mandatory possessor, which appears as a suffix. The actual root of the word is ús, which implies a definite third person possessor (meaning thus “his/her/its/their name(s)”). The citation form usé actually includes the indefinite suffix -(s)e, so that usé actually means “someone’s name” (it’s the form used when one wants to talk about names in general, rather than a specific person’s name in particular). Other forms are for instance usún: “my name” and usí: “your (sg) name”.

Naming is really serious business in Mountain Folk culture, so they have a lot of vocabulary surrounding this area. We’re going to see a few of these words in the next days.

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17th Lexember Word

retáppa [ɾe̞ˈdäˑpːə̆], transitive verb: “to save/rescue (someone); to help/aid (someone); to resucitate (someone)“

Two days ago, I explained how nihárpa only refers to “non-vital” help, i.e. help in “safe” situations like helping someone with their homework or helping them put an IKEA closet together (which is only dangerous if you do it with your partner! ;-P). I also mentioned how there was a way to refer to helping someone out of a dangerous or even lethal situation. And retáppa is the way!

Like nihárpa, retáppa is a causative form of retáp that has shifted in meaning. From its original meaning of “to make (someone) alive” (which is still used in the sense of “to make (someone) alive again”, i.e. “to resuscitate”), it has come to mean “to save” or “to rescue”, and by extension “to help (someone) out of a dangerous situation”. Saving someone from drowning, or from a vicious badger attack, or helping them deal with that contract that’s on their head, are all cases where retáppa is the right verb to use (at least to describe the situation, not necessarily to solve it :-P).

Like nihárpa, retáppa also has a slightly irregular plural form retámmo. It’s used exactly like nihámmo, so refer to that post for more information.

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16th Lexember Word

retáp [ɾe̞ˈdäˑp], intransitive verb: “to live, to be/stay alive; to survive; to be born“

What we have here is essentially the opposite of kúr: “to die, to be dead“. This verb refers to the state of being alive, but also to the concept of reaching that state, and of maintaining it despite adversity.

While it somewhat corresponds to the English verb “to live”, it is more restricted in its use than the latter. In particular, it cannot be used when “to live” means “to dwell, to reside” (in Haotyétpi ás: “to be, to exist” is sometimes used in that sense, although there are other verbs for that specific meaning), nor is it used when you want to talk about “living in a certain way” or when you want to mention that someone is “still alive” despite their age (here again, ás will usually be used to cover that sense). Rather, it is used whenever the notion of “being alive” is connected to that of “surviving”. Basically, if you want to say: “he has lived for a long time”, you use retáp. If you want to say “he has lived for a long time in that house”, you use ás or another verb of dwelling. If you want to say “he has lived a long time with his wife”, you use ás as well.

Also, in its dynamic sense, retáp means “to be born” in the conceptual, abstract sense, not the biological one. It could be more accurately translated as “to come into existence”, but that’s a mouthful :-P. Also, while it does not refer to birth as an actual, biological event, it still refers to someone or something “becoming alive”, so it cannot be used to refer to something that is not alive coming into existence. Here again, ás can be used for that (in its dynamic sense).

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15th Lexember Word

nihárpa [ɲiˈɦäˑɾpə̆], transitive verb: “to help/assist/aid (someone)“

What we’ve got here is an interesting case of semantic shift. Nihárpa is morphologically the causative form of nihár. However, it’s an old causative form that is not productive anymore and that has changed meaning with time, going from “to make (someone) strong” to “to help (someone)” (because helping is effectively giving, or at least lending, someone the power to solve their problem).

In terms of meaning, nihárpa is used strictly for “non-vital” help. It is used for instance to speak about helping someone do their homework, or helping someone fill in their tax forms (Being late with one’s tax declarations is not lethal, right?). Helping someone out of a dangerous, life-threatening situation is handled differently, as we’ll soon see :-).

Like a number of other verbs, nihárpa has a separate, slightly irregular plural form: nihámmo. It’s used when the object of the verb is plural or indefinite (i,e. not mentioned in speech or known by context), as with every transitive verb with a plural form.

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14th Lexember Word

nihár rosen [ɲiˈɦäˑrə̆ʑe̞̽ŋ], verb phrase: “to be weak; to be trivial“

I will not spend much time on the semantics of this phrase, which is basically the opposite of yesterday’s word. Rather, I want to point out that it’s a rather interesting construction.

To put it simply, =rosen (the = is used to emphasise its status as enclitic) is a verbal clitic used to mark the desiderative mood (i.e. “to want” or “to need”). However, with intransitive verbs, it often forms more idiomatic constructions marking a state of lack or want. For instance, with cupí: “to sleep“, one can form cupí rosen: “to be tired, to be sleepy“ (literally “to want/need to sleep”, compare and contrast with urún: “to tire, to be/get tired”). With yó: “to eat“, you get ayóm rosen: “to be hungry“ (literally “to want/need to eat”. Ayóm is the antipassive form of yó, turning it into an intransitive verb with no need of an object). This is a relatively common construction, and nihár rosen is just another example, where “weakness” is described as a “need to become strong”.

There is also a level of euphemism going on here. Calling someone weak is a relatively strong insult in Mountain Folk culture, so people tend to avoid directly pointing that out. A circumlocution like nihár rosen contains the word nihár itself, and thus “feels” more acceptable. Also, =rosen implies a will to leave that state of weakness, which further softens it. That’s why this idiomatic use of =rosen is rather common: when people want to ascribe a negative quality to someone else, it is much more diplomatic to say that they “want to reach” a positive quality, rather than abruptly stating that they lack it altogether.

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13th Lexember Word

nihár [ɲiˈɦäˑɾ], intransitive verb: “to be/become powerful, to be/become strong; to be/become serious”

With nihár, we leave the semantic field of warm and cold, and get into that of power :-). Interestingly, this is not the first time I introduce a word meaning “to be strong” during a Lexember event. Last year, I coined már: “to be violent, to be intense; to be strong”. The two are definitely not synonyms, as you can see from the glosses, but they do overlap a little. Basically, már is used when extreme force is currently being exerted. In particular, it is used with weather phenomena to indicate that they are stronger than usual (hence the noun markó: “windstorm”). Nihár, on the other hand, refers to intrinsic strength or power, whether it currently translates into applied force or not.

Moreover, már’s semantic field extends into the areas of violence and intensity (a light can már, if it is blinding), while nihár is rather used of situations, to indicate that they are to take seriously and not as a laughing matter. Here again, notice that we are not talking about an immediate threat: a situation can be serious without immediately being an issue. Rather, it is potentially an issue. Nihár refers to strength as a potential, már to strength as it is observed.

Notice that in the gloss, I indicated that nihár can mean both “to be powerful” and “to become powerful”. This is a general property of stative verbs in Haotyétpi that they can also take a dynamic meaning of becoming or reaching that state, without any derivation needed. So a verb like nák can mean both “to stand” or “to stand up”, and a verb like ankyoyták can mean both “to be cold” and “to become cold”. Context is usually more than enough to disambiguate between the stative and dynamic meanings of such verbs (and there are ways to make them explicit if needed). The only reason I didn’t mark all the relevant glosses of the stative verbs I introduced so far that way is because that made the glosses much too long and somewhat confusing. For the same reason, I will usually not add the “/become” next to “be” in the glosses of the upcoming stative verbs. But remember that it is always there :-).

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12th Lexember Word

okkoáp [o̞kːo̞̽ˈäˑp], intransitive verb: “to be/feel warm/hot (to the touch)”

With okkoáp, we finally finish our trip through the various ways of talking about temperature in Haotyétpi (well, of course there are more ways, but this will do for now! :-P).

Okkoáp is quite simply the opposite of titúp. It doesn’t refer to the environment, nor to a feeling that is experienced due to the environment, but to an object’s inherent warmth or heat. Something (or someone) is okkoáp if they feel warm or hot to the touch (or if they look like they would feel that way if you were to touch them). Of course, okkoáp forms a complementary pair with yesterday’s ankokkoáp, in the same way that titúp forms a complementary pair with ankyoyyé:

• Things that are ankokkoáp: people in a warm environment, rooms, porches, halls;
• Things that are okkoáp: a nice sweater, coffee, hot water, anything coming out of an oven, living people (they can feel cold, but that’s usually a temporary state, or they are not well!).

A peculiarity of okkoáp is that unlike the other words referring to warmth that we’ve seen so far, but like okkó itself of which it is an obvious derivation, it doesn’t distinguish between plain warmth and uncomfortable heat. So something that is simply warm will be just as okkoáp as something that is scalding hot. If you really need to make the distinction, a simple way to do so is to simply qualify okkoáp. There are various ways to do so, but simply using peksó (an adverb meaning “badly”, which is also commonly used as an intensifier) is an easy way to achieve that, with peksó okkoáp meaning “to be very warm” or “to be hot”. Another common way is to use the excessive suffix -yatome, forming okkoápyatome: “to be too hot”.

As I mentioned before, titúp is not only used for the literal coldness but also for the metaphorical one. This extends to okkoáp, which can also be used of people to indicate that they are kind or caring.

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