Ákat objects: the rocks of the world

The Ákat philosophical metaphor for the concept of language is that of a land of rock. All mental and physical concepts are contained within the bedrock of this land, but in their unformed state they cannot be articulated. For a concept to be articulated, it must be hewn from the bedrock and assigned a sound (and a shape).

Much of the early philosophical work that led to the development of Ákat concentrated on discovering the sounds of these key concepts by comparing and contrasting the base languages' word groups and word relationships. Early on in this work the Nakap philosophers agreed that the number of core concepts were limited, and unique in their sound forms.

Core concepts are thus the bricks around which the Ákat language is built. They are not words, nor even roots; they are concepts - in the Nakap philosophical sense - from which object (and action) words are derived.

All Ákat core concepts have a strict CVC structure, where C=[ptkqfsxc] and V=[ieayou]; some irregularities occur - the final C can also be a glottal stop['], and the numerical core concepts have [hn] in the initial position.

Words arise from core concepts - of which there are over 380 - through the processes of class assignment and derivation. It is on this set of roots that the entire reformed language was subsequently built.

Examples of pure core concept roots can be found under the core listings in the online Ákat lexicon.

Concerning objects and actions in the Ákat language

Before proceeding any further, it is worth noting that Ákat has just one open class of words (alongside several closed classes of particles), covering both objects (nouns and modifiers) and actions (verbs). Derived appropriately and placed correctly in a clause, a word can take on either objective or active properties.

However in practical terms it is better to consider this class to be divided into two subclasses of object words and action words, as their treatment within the clause differs radically. This does not change the fact that in the world view of Ákat speakers any object word can be used as an action word, though the semantic relationship between some of the action-object pairs may seem illogical (or even perverse) when first encountered.