Chapter 11 Nouns and their world
The words of the exchange
The last words-of section follows what changes hands. Base Phi has verbs for giving, receiving, sharing, taking, and exchanging, along with words for a gift, labor, worth, and sufficiency.
The hands' verbs
Giving, receiving, sharing, taking, exchanging: loa, howela, phowe, pilu, wisola. The gift is loami, and the giving sentence uses the dative you know:
mia wei thia loami loa.
1SG DAT 2SG gift give.
wisola (exchange) is built to lean mutual; its natural companion is the reciprocal pronoun:
lo mia wiso wisola.
PL 1SG RECP exchange.
The optional Work, Craft, and Repair module adds piru (trader) when exchange is a person's continuing work. A base-vocabulary description remains available: whu lo thena ro wisola miona, a person who habitually exchanges goods.
The counting owed
An exchange often requires exact counts because the difference affects what each participant gives and receives. The market-day text conducts a morning of trade on that principle, bowls for eggs, asked with wia and answered with exact ternary numerals. Other exchanges may use an estimate or qualitative description by agreement. The scene names neither price nor payment; an exact economic record remains available outside the Phi passage when needed.
The refusal, third of three
Phi has deliberately left money, price, buying, selling, debt, and wage without core roots. Ordinary Phi describes the transfer, work, need, gift, or institution under discussion. Exact amounts and source economic terms remain in separate records for history, labour rights, contracts, critique, testimony, and practical coordination, so the refusal cannot blur exploitation or falsify a record.
Work and worth
Work is riola (labor), and its kin are all plural at heart: molawi (cooperate), wenola (collaborate), shorema (contribute), muraki (harvest):
lo miona molawi.
PL person cooperate.
Worth survives the refusal intact, carved into two honest words. rolia (worth) is inherent, what a being has by being. sone (value) is a verb, so valuing is visibly something someone does to a thing, never a property the thing carries alone:
mia thia rolia nila.
1SG 2SG worth see.
simoe (rich) describes soil, colours, and flavours, not a social rank. Material lack has no base root meaning poor: a harvest can be phina (few), a bowl can be whemoa (empty), and henoi (enough) with lorua (abundant, plenty to share) hold the other end. When material lack matters, the account names the missing thing or the insufficient amount instead of making it a class of person.
The gift in use
The Prophet's teaching on giving lives on the texts shelf with reward transmuted as loami, while the Tao selection answers harm with kindness. Those are literary choices, not meanings forced by the grammar. wisola often takes the reciprocal, sone requires someone who does the valuing, and the dative gift sentence identifies its recipient. The words leave the terms of an exchange open enough for speakers to state them, refuse them, or change them together.