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Re: "Anticipatory" Tense

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Wednesday, March 6, 2002, 7:41
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.