Lexicon

Nahaıwa's lexicon can be found here (TSV format) and here (HTML format).

For roots, participant slots are represented by noun case abbreviations between square brackets, ordered according to the following case hierarchy:

  • For unary roots: Intransitive case;
  • For binary verbs and higher valencies: Ergative → Dative → Codative → Accusative;

Lexicosemantics

The lexicon of Nahaıwa purposefully lacks lexical polysemy (also known as colexification), specifically the kind in which a same sound form has a prefined set of discrete, contextually-selected possible meanings that cannot all be simultaneously selected, such as the English “bat”, which can mean a wooden stick, or a flying mammal, but cannot mean both at once: in the sentence “there are two bats in the room”, one would not assume a reading where there's one wooden stick and one flying mammal. This is to be contrasted with words which have a single broad meaning, such as “animal” (which covers mammals, birds, reptiles, insects, snails, worms…), and words with disjunctive meanings (i.e. which can be defined using the logical disjunction “or”, yielding a discontinuous semantic space).

Semantic broadness (as with “animal”) is not a form of polysemy, and is both desirable, useful and absolutely necessary for any functional general purpose language. A word like “animal”, when put to the aforementioned test of polysemy, yields a valid statement: “there are two animals in the room” is acceptable to say when there's exactly one flying mammal and one reptile in the room, a result unlike that with the polysemous word “bat”. A semantically broad word like “animal” can be part of Nahaıwa's lexicon, but a polysemous word like “bat” cannot.