Early Hick Common Phrases and Maxims

This page collects short Early Hick expressions that are useful as phrases, ritual sayings, or examples of compact style. For the full grammar, see Early Hick.

Greetings and Farewells

Without Bitterness

Idiomatic sense:

Welcome; come in peace; no hard feelings.

This greeting is formulaic rather than an ordinary finite clause. It compresses mo-kras-sim “not-bitter-TRANS” into a threshold greeting used when receiving someone across a social boundary: into a house, onto a boat, into a camp, or back into conversation after tension.

The form answers the social risk of resentment. It does not literally command the hearer to change state so much as wish that bitterness not arise between host and guest.

Above Bitterness

Idiomatic sense:

Farewell; part without bitterness.

This farewell pairs with mokrassim. The superessive -itar gives the metaphor: bitterness is something beneath the departing speaker and listener, not something carried onward.

The clipped form krassim is sometimes heard as a mistaken or outsider form of the greeting, but it is semantically awkward in careful Early Hick because it resembles kras-sim “become bitter.”

Sacred and Ethical Maxims

Truth and the Righteous Path

Idiomatic sense:

To have truth revealed, one walks the righteous path.

This maxim preserves transparent thrallas, from thral-las “sacred light-ILL.” The first clause is compact and proverbial rather than an ordinary finite verbal clause. The second clause gives the habitual action or discipline through which the revelation is understood to occur.

Later ritual usage hears thrallas as the fused lexical noun thralas “divine revelation, sacred illumination.” In this reading, the maxim itself helps fossilize the phrase into a sacred term.

The balance between thrallas and thralwades depends on the sacred-light sense of thral: truth does not simply get found, but enters sacred illumination through right walking.

A Scavenger’s Words

Idiomatic sense:

Opportunistic lies lodge themselves in the listener’s mind.

This maxim uses imtirok “scavenger” metaphorically for an opportunist or con-artist. The image is not that cave dwellers are inherently corrupt, but that the words take on a constructed ka’irurlislas “cave-dweller state”: they settle into a hidden inner place and remain there.

The form ka’irurlislas’er is poetic and proverbial. It was likely coined for the maxim rather than inherited as an ordinary everyday verb, though repeated quotation may later lexicalize it. The final grapales preserves the Maltreks or upper Malter Valley regional plural of grapal, beside standard grapares from grapar “earthworm.”