Re: time distinctions

On Sun, Aug 27, 2000 at 05:18:50PM +0200, Irina Rempt wrote:
[snip]
> Well, there's no formal distinction in Valdyan between the plain
> second person present (singular or plural) and the imperative:
>
>    le mostay  - you (s) come (here), come (here)!
>    le mostaye - you (p) come (here), come (here)!
[snip]

Coolness! Why didn't I think of that before? :-P I think I'll do something
along these lines... Though, verbs in my conlang are not inflected for
tense, so I might need to use a temporal noun for the present. Maybe this
temporal noun might be assimilated into a tense ending in descendent
conlangs :-)

But OTOH, my verbs *do* have an aspect called the "initiative", which
indicates the beginning of an event/action (as opposed to the progressive,
denoting incompleteness, or the perfective, which denotes the complete,
entire event). Maybe I can make an imperative from this by using a
second-person pronoun and a future temporal noun -- something along the
lines of "You will begin to write the letter!" ("begin to write" = verb in
initiative aspect).


T