Greyfolk language’s monosyllabic roots and words: roots 1–5

In my previous post, I gave described the background and the process of coming up with the monosyllabic roots and words for the greyfolk language. There are 20 of them, but, in this post, I will go over the first five.

Obviously, the “head-initial” vowel for each of these words is «e», which means that each is a noun or a pronoun. In this case, these are all pronouns.

Previously, «pe», «te», and «ke» were the first-, second-, and third-person pronoun, respectively. As I worked with Hamming distance, it was obvious that these pronouns would likely have to change.

«me» is the new singular first-person pronoun. Coincidentally, it should be very familiar. In human language, there are all sorts of me and mi first-person pronouns floating around. As the first-person pronoun, it would translate into English as both ‘I’ and ‘me’ depending whether it was the subject or object.

«se» is the new singular second-person pronoun. It would translate into English as ‘you’, which is both the subject and object.

«ke» is the new singular third-person pronoun. It would translate into English as ‘he’, ‘him’, ‘she’, ‘her’, ‘it’, or the singular form of ‘they’ or ‘them’. Gender and sex do not matter for «ke». And, again, it can be both subject or object.

«tle» is the mediopassive pronoun, which is new to my conlang. As a subject, it is a passive or impersonal construction. As an object, it basically means ‘myself’, ‘yourself’, etc. For example, let’s say «tonya» is a verb that means ‘to hurt’. «tle tonya me» means ‘I am hurt’. It can be thought of as ‘[blank] hurts me’. It’s almost an even more abstract version of «ke» in this context, but it puts the focus on the object instead of the subject. «me tonya tle» is a bit simpler, and it means ‘I hurt myself’.

«yel» is the demonstrative pronoun and «yil» is the demonstrative modifier. They both mean ‘this’, but they are used in slightly different ways. «yel» would just translate as ‘this’, but «ke yil» would translate as ‘this one’. There will probably be another word for ‘that’, but I haven’t figured that out yet.^{Get it?}

As a last little bonus, these aren’t monosyllabic words, the plural personal pronouns will probably be «mema», «sesa», and «keka». The singular and plural correlations should be quite obvious!