Re: Spoken Thoughts ( My second, better formed, non crappy Language)

Hey, I'm back from a rather long hiatus over the holidays, but I'm
back.  I've seen some interesting things in my few days here, too.  It's
good to be back!

Responding to Cristophe:

> Well, I think you're mixing things here. Verb forms belong to categories, in
> which the forms are mutually exclusive. Mostly three categories of verb forms
> are recognized universally (even if some languages sometimes lack one or the
> other, or put them on other types of words): Mood, Tense and Aspect. You can
> also add the category of Person for languages where verbs agree in person with
> their subject.
This is only partly true.  A lot of modern analyses recognize at least
four categories: Tense, Aspect, Mood, and Illocutionary Force.  That last
one, of course, is the bugger and it's rather hard to pin down which
properties are modal and which are illocutionary.

>
> The Tense category describes the absolute location in time of the action
> (typically past, present and future, even if some languages have more than one
> degree in past and/or in future). The Aspect category describes more a relative
> relation with time, that's to say whether the action is completed (perfect),
> ongoing (progressive), punctual (aorist), still to be done (prospective), etc...
> Finally, the Mood category describes the more the opinion of the speaker about
> the action, whether it is simply described (indicative), seen subjectively
> (subjunctive), wished (optative), ordered (imperative), wanted (desiderative),
> hypothetical (conditional), mandatory, possible, probable, etc...
>
This is where the Mood category gets split up.  Mood per se deals only
with the relation of the statement to reality: whether it is objectively
true (indicative), objectively false (negative), unlikely (dubitive),
dependent upon something else (conditional), "sub-joined" to another
action (subjunctive),
probable, reported to be true, etc.  In many Papauan languages there is a
modal distinction between information attested by the speaker himself and
information that is simply hearsay, for example.  Illocutionary force
deals with the
attitude of the speaker toward the statement: neutral (indicative), wished
for (optative), commanded (imperative), etc.

> Inside a category, the forms are mutually exclusive: you cannot have a verb at
> the same in present and in past. So your question about a subjunctive imperative
> form is answered: it is not possible because subjunctive and imperative are both
> moods, and thus cannot appear together in the same verb (in fact, there ar even
> languages that express order through the subjunctive mood).
Actually, there are many languages in which Mood and Illocutionary Force
are categories that can contain more than one member.  This is especially
true of agglutinative languages that have several non-exclusive affixes
indicating modal or illocutionary properties.  Yivríndil is one of these
languages!


 On the other hand,
> you can make as many combinations of forms of the three categories as you want
> (even if languages don't always have all: French has a subjunctive past, but not
> English, Greek had indicative, subjunctive and optative, while Latin had only
> indicative and subjunctive). That's why in English you can have past perfect,
> present perfect and future perfect (all of the indicative mood). In written
> French we have the past simple (which is a past aorist) as well as the imperfect
> (which is really a past progressive). Portuguese opposes an indicative future
> with a subjunctive future, and Classicial Latin had an imperative present but
> also an imperative future!
>
> As for verb forms in English, you can count all those made through the so-called
> modals (you counted the future which is expressed in English by will+verb, so
> why not the others?) which correspond to different moods (would for the
> conditional for instance).
>
> > I have an intransitive prefix/suffix that makes the verb intransitive.
> >
>
> Is it an affix which would allow to say "I eat-affix" instead of "I eat it", or
> a passivizer affix making "It eat-affix": "It is eaten" from "I eat it"? I mean,
> what's the meaning of the intransitive verb derived from a transitive verb in
> this way?
Yeah, "intransitive prefix" isn't particularly informative.

Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
"It is of the new things that men tire--of fashions and proposals and
improvements and change.  It is the old things that startle and
intoxicate.  It is the old things that are young."
-G.K. Chesterton _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_