9.5 "I'm cold, I'm sleepy, I like it" — saying how you feel
9 · Syntax — putting words in order · a plain-language guide to Assyrian (Sureth) grammar
From Khan §12.6. This is the highest-value page in his clause chapter and nothing in this guide covered it before.
English builds almost every feeling the same way: I am the subject, and the feeling is what I am or what I do. I am cold. I like it. I am sleepy. I feel like eating.
Assyrian does that too — but only sometimes. Very often the feeling is the thing doing the acting, and you are not the subject at all. You are the object it happened to, or simply its owner. Get this wrong and you are understood but you sound translated; get it right and a lot of everyday speech suddenly parses.
There are three shapes, and it is worth meeting all three at once because you cannot predict which one a given feeling takes — you learn them per word.
Shape 1 — you are the subject, as in English
The straightforward ones. An adjective plus the copula, or an ordinary verb:
| Assyrian | English |
|---|---|
| khabuleven | I'm cold |
| kayreven | I'm cold |
| shakhineven | I'm hot |
| bekhdayele | he's happy |
| ki-bayyennakh | I love you |
| ki-maghghebbennun khokhe | I like the peaches |
| bekhzayukh-ven | I see you |
Shape 2 — the feeling is the subject, and it does something to you
Here the sensation is grammatically the doer, and you are its object. English has fossils of this ("it grieves me," "a thought struck me") but Assyrian uses it live:
| Assyrian | literally | English |
|---|---|---|
| karta mkhitila | a cold has struck me | I've caught a cold |
| anne varde karta ruppitela | cold has thrown those flowers down | those flowers have caught the frost |
| ujaba dvikenne | amazement seized me | I was amazed |
| kherpu dvekla kati | a hiccup seized me | I hiccupped |
Shape 3 — the feeling is yours, and it comes and goes
This is the largest group and the one most worth drilling, because the pattern is so productive: take a noun for the feeling, put a possessive ending on it (-i "my", -ukh/-akh "your"), and let it come, go, ask or simply be there.
| Assyrian | literally | English |
|---|---|---|
| khemmile | there is my heat | I'm hot |
| shenti bitayela | my sleep is coming | I'm sleepy |
| khoshi bitayela men-daha | my goodness is coming from this | I like this |
| zali berrekhshela men-daha | my dislike is going from this | I don't like it |
| kepi la tila | my enjoyment did not come | I didn't enjoy it |
| sodukh bitayele? | is your enjoyment coming? | are you enjoying it? |
| soda letli | I have no enjoyment | I don't feel like it |
| hosala letli azen | I have no disposition to go | I don't feel like going |
| lebbi tlabele akhlen | my heart requests that I eat | I feel like eating |
Two notes on that table:
- lebba "heart" is doing what it does in a dozen languages. You already met it in Chapter 4's lebbu ptekhle "he was pleased" (literally "his heart opened"), and here it is again asking for dinner. When you meet a body part with a possessive on it, suspect a feeling.
- letli and etli from "There is" and "to have" (Chapter 4) are half of this. "I don't feel like it" is literally "I don't have enjoyment" — the same have construction you already know, with an abstract noun in it.
And sometimes the grammar just doesn't say
Khan records a fourth pattern where the person is named up front and left grammatically unattached — which is really Naming the topic first below, arriving early:
| Assyrian | literally | English |
|---|---|---|
| bratokhun khoshi titela | your daughter — my goodness has come | I've become fond of your daughter |
| a nasha khtito tila | this man — the pity of it came | this man felt sorry for it |
Where this comes from. Khan is explicit that the object and possessor shapes are a regional habit rather than an inherited Aramaic one: Kurdish, Azeri and Persian all say "a cold struck me" and "my hotness is", and Assyrian in Urmi says it with them. That is useful to know, because it means these are the constructions a speaker of any of those languages will find obvious — and the ones an English speaker has to learn on purpose.
---