Re: Lahabic Aspects and Tenses

>    From: Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
>Subject: Re: Lahabic Aspects and Tenses
>
>On Thu, 12 Oct 2000, Anthony M. Miles wrote:
>
> > I had to rush away for someone more urgent. Feel free to critique the
> > system. Are there too many conjugations (asks the man with 33 prefixes)?
>Too
> > few? Do you see a difficulty that I don't? I will cover the persons of
>the
> > verb in a following e-mail. I don't know what I should do about the
>passive,
> > if anything.
>[snip]
>
>No, doesn't seem like too many conjugations to me.  At least you don't
>have a whole system of honorific conjugations on top of it <G>.  I saw
>patterns in the first part that made the system look easy to learn, then
>got confused, probably because I don't know what aorists or jussives
>are.  :-(  Forgive my ignorance....
>
>YHL
I only gave one form of the verb (insert evil grin here). BTW, -n/-z is not
a realis/irrealis alteration. -n is the usual (3rd singular) citation form,
but -z is the 1st person singular form corresponding to the translations.
Honorifics, grammatical ones anyway, are not part of  the Islanders'
mentality. The system is easy to learn because before I posted it the
revised system fit on the back of a paper from a small memo book. The
Lahabic-speaking Islanders might have trouble, though, with the conflation
of infinitive forms). The aorist is an aspect fundamental to the
understanding of Ancient Greek. It denotes an action that takes place once,
or in a discrete series. It does not, however, have the same connection to
completeness that the perfective does. In a Lahabic passage devoid of other
clues, the aorist tends to be past and present, the imperfective present,
and the perfective past. The jussive is a Latin term for hortatives ("let us
go", "let them go"). The original imperative of Lahabic no longer served its
purpose and was phonetically naive.

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