Negation

Negation in Qohenje is a lexemic category, and applies equally to nominals and verbals. The same morpheme (essentially) manifests differently according to its incidental role.

Verbal negation

The negative morpheme is prefixed to the verbal to be negated. The written form of is actually "al", but this is simply a spelling convention, and has nothing to do with the pronunciation.

The negative prefix presents the semantic content of the lexeme as non-actual or non-true — which is not the same as reversing it: Qohenje has a different prefix ( ) that allows the inversion of the stem sense. There is hence an important difference between,

 

 

Some examples:

 

As these examples show, all nominal arguments around negated verbals are in the AX case (or else are themselves negative, see below).

Note however that such formations are still actually "positive statements" in Qohenje. The predication in the first negative example above is The dog IS in a state of [not-having-bitten] me. In this sense, one cannot really make a “negative” statement in Qohenje. All predications assert something true and are in that sense “positive”.

Nominal negation

The same morpheme can be employed with nominals. When this is the case, the negated lexeme can no longer bear any energetic relationship to a verbal (not even an accidental one) and hence the NEG morpheme replaces the case marker.

The NEG morpheme has thus a suffix (LM) form and a prefix (TR) form, which is the same as the verbal negator . The negative marker is used with independent proforms (see pronouns).

 

 

Qohenje places no restrictions (other than semantic ones) on multiple negations:

 

 

Clearly, these get quite hard to understand. The implication of the last example is that I, the dog and an act of biting have been proposed, but I am denying the actuality of any of them ('There may be a dog, and I am here, but nothing has bitten anything....')