Otseconcepts: Information Territory

Various facets of Otseqon make a distinction regarding how one knows things. Loosely, this is things one has some first-hand stake in and things one does not. I am calling this one's "information territory". Your information territory basically encompasses information acquired directly through your senses, information stemming from you, and information pertaining to an inner social circle (more or less, people you know really well and have a certain degree of trust in). Things in your information territory include what you are planning to do today (you are the source of this information) or, for example, the health of your parents, whether your best friend is in town/out of town, that you firsthand saw a whale yesterday, etc. Things outside of your information territory include that the star Betelgeuse is about 550 light years away, that Mexican free-tailed bats can fly up to 100 miles per hour, or that the convenience store manager said they're out of donuts. This can be somewhat mutable: if you, yourself, measured the speed of a Mexican free-tailed bat as flying 100 miles per hour, that would become part of your information territory.

This applies to certain areas of grammar and lexicon. Lexically, it is the distinction between the words sotowo ‘knowledge, understanding (of things inside one's information territory)’ and naka ‘knowledge (of things outside one's information territory)’. (Syntactically, both of these pattern like directly possessed nouns¹, that is, the knower is indexed with the dative/possessive suffixes and marked with the dative preposition.)

The distinction is also relevant in the area of evidentiality. Otseqon makes a 4-way evidentiality distinction: direct, reported (this also includes things one has read), inferred, and assumed. The unmarked so-called "direct" evidential really encompasses everything within one's information territory, even things that were not obtained directly through one's senses (it is still, in a sense, more directly known than information originating outside your information territory, however). For example, if your mother was out shopping, you would use the direct/unmarked evidential even if you only knew this because she told you earlier. Using the reported evidential in this case would imply that you don't quite know what she's up to, or that someone outside of your family told you where she was.

There were I think two other things I was thinking of that this also applied to to some degree but I sort of forgot what they were. One of em I think had to do with sentence final particles.

¹ No, Otseqon doesn't suddenly have nouns. It's easier to concisely describe verbs describing entities as nouns, although as we'll see in a future Otseconcepts post the line between verbs describing entities and verbs describing processes can be very blurry indeed.