Re: "Anticipatory" Tense

En réponse à Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>:

>
> This could clearly be developed, using a preposition meaning 'before',
> to
> produce a fully-fledged system of prospective tense forms.
>
Well, it took me a while to realise this (slow brains, I need to get more
sleep :(( ), but my language Astou, which I created when I was about 17 (thus
nearly 9 years ago, yep, my birthday's coming along soon :)) ) does have such a
tense form!

I'm currently writing a grammar of Astou using LaTeX, so I had to dig up my
notes on it. But I just realized today that its tense system features
this "prospective" or opposite of the perfect. In fact, the tense system of
Astou is pretty symmetrical. It has a present, a past, a future, a present
perfect (called "linked past") and this "prospective" (called "linked future").
Since I've never written any text in it, I don't know exactly its use, but
since in my notes I defined it as the "opposite of the linked past", I cannot
see another use :)) .

The Astou verbal system is quite interesting in itself: an active voice opposed
to a middle voice (but no passive voice. This is for the "Classical Ancient
Language" feeling :)) ), two moods: discursive and narrative (the narrative is
used to tell stories, and is special for not having other forms than the third
person, which means that if you tell a story about yourself, you have to refer
to yourself in the third person. Nice philosophical implications :)) ), two
aspects: perfective and imperfective (or simple and continuous), those five
tenses (which get different names whether they are in narrative or discursive
mood, since in the narrative mood the "present" usually refers to a past
event :)) ) and a verb which gets in the active voice both subject and object
endings.

Hehe, my LaTeX installation allows me to make PS and PDF files, so when I'm
finished I can send to anyone interested such files :) .

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.