Re: Jovian's Verbs From Hell

--- In conlang@y..., Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@F...> wrote:
> En réponse à Christian Thalmann <cinga@G...>:
> > I only had two years of Latin, at which level it was manageable, since
> > we hadn't looked at more than two or three verb tenses.
>
> ?!!! After my first year of Latin we had already seen all tenses, moods and
> voices of Latin verbs!!!
I presume that's because you were already speaking a Romance language
with similar grammatical features as a native language...  we had to
learn a whole range of new grammatical concepts in Latin class because
our German lessons hadn't taught them to us.


> They are not so difficult you know (actually they are
> extremely simple in my point of view)/
In your romlang-native point of view, that is.  =P


> The fact that they
> are mostly isolating forms doesn't change the fact that in normal speech they
> can get pretty easily mixed up (believe my experience of non-native speaker).
I'm a non-native speaker too, and I find the isolation helpful.  The
"strong verbs" are a difficulty, of course, but you have them in
most romlangs too.  At least in English you only have to recognize
four forms of the verb (present, past, and the two participles)...



> Compared to that, the Latin forms are pretty recognizable, and easily analysed
> anyway (for regular verbs of course ;)) . And look a little closely at the
> Latin system: three tenses (past, present, future) mixed up with two aspects
> (imperfect and perfect - the usual terminology is unclear, but you can see very
> well the distribution by recognising that the present, "imperfect" and future
> forms are based on one root, the imperfect root, while
> the "perfect", "pluperfect" and future perfect are the same tenses but based on
> the perfect root -)
If only it were that simple.  The first person imperfect and future
of |amâre| are |amâbam| and |amâbô|.  But the pluperfect and future
perfect forms are |amâverô| and |amâveram| -- just the other way
round!



> three finite moods (indicative, subjunctive and
> imperative - and subjunctive and imperative don't even allow all tense/aspect
> combinations -)
Another difficulty is that the subjunctive present forms of one
conjugation often look like the indicative forms of another
conjugation.  /=P

More later, gotta catch my train.  =P



-- Christian Thalmann

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