Re: Silindion - Present Tense

--- "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...> wrote:
~~~~

SNIPPING A LARGE PORTION

> > Athematic presents do not have a thematic vowel
> for 1
> > of 2 reasons.
> >
> > 1) The root is a vowel stem: -ya, -a, -e, -u, -i,
> -o
> > 2) The root is a root accented consonant stem.
> >
> > For these roots, the personal endings are added
> > directly to the root final vowel or consonant. In
> the
> > case of vowel stem roots, there's no problem, but
> in
> > the case of consonant stem roots, some changes
> must
> > take place.
>
> This system sounds very much like Classical Greek,
> too. (Or is it a
> more general phenomenon across inflecting natlangs?
> The only
> significantly inflected natlang I know is Classical
> Greek. :-P)

~~~ Yes, I've been influence by Greek, although the
Athematic/Thematic idea is from Indo European in
general. I stole a lot from Sanskrit and Latin and
Greek and ...although not IE, Finnish. All of these
have helped form the Silindion verbal system.


> > The ending for the 3rd singular is either -n, or
> -r.
> > Originally this must have distinguished certain
> types
> > of transitive verbs from certain types of
> intransitive
> > verbs, although the difference between the two is
> > largely lexical at the present stage of Silindion.
> The
> > -r ending is still largely reserved for many
> > intransitive verbs, although not all intransitives
> > will take the -r ending and some transitives will
> have
> > it.
>
> Nice historical detail.

It's both historical detail and me covering my tracks.
I have no idea what I was thinking when I originally
started the -r/-n contrast, almost 7 years ago. Most
of the time the -r is on intransitives whose agent is
either non-volitional, or is in some way affected by
the action. But occasionally, that's not the case at
all. And sometimes, groups which seem like they should
be uniform, aren't.

 Example:  fil "come"   fil-i- "present-thematic"
           ya  "go"     ya-   "present-athematic"

      fil-i-n  "he/she comes"
      ya-r     "he/she goes"

I dont know why this is anymore! But I daren't change
it, I like it so much.

~Elliott


		
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