Re: Jovian's Verbs From Hell

 --- Christian Thalmann <cinga@...> wrote: > ---
In conlang@y..., JS Bangs <jaspax@U...> wrote:
>
> > Latin is evil?
>
> 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.  Recently, I
> looked at the conjugation tables at the following
> link, which
> disclosed to me how truly evil the system was.  So
> many tense/mood/
> voice combinations!  And all so similar-sounding!
> =P
>
and this makes latin evil ? what about greek ? . . .

latin : greek
tenses 6:7
present, imperfect, future, perfect, pluperfect,
future perfect : present, future, imperfect, aorist,
perfect, pluperfect, future perfect
voices 2:3
active, passive : active, middle, passive
finite moods 2:3
indicative, subjunctive : indicative, subjunctive,
optative
numbers 2:3
singular, plural : singular, dual, plural

also, greek has participles and infinitives for every
aspect of every voice ( plus futures ) and imperatives
for every aspect of every voice ( i can't remember
about futures, but i don't think so )

to latin's four principal parts ( with the first two
being the same stem ) greek has six, all independent
to some extent ( partly down to the fact that many
passive stems are entirely different from the active
ones — the middle hovers between the two )

then you have athematic verbs and tenses so you get to
practice your internal sandhi

and finally, greek allows you to form verbs using the
verb |eimí|, to be, and a participle

makes latin seem straightforward !

>
> However, now that I've defined the past tense based
> on the Latin
> imperfect, I find myself disliking the length of
> those forms --
> perfects would consequently shave off a syllable.
> Ah, well...
>
you could use the poetic perfect ( drop the v and
elide . . . not sure whether all these forms are real,
but you could standardise )

pf ind
ama: ama:sti ama:t ama:mus ama:stis ama:re
ppf ind
ama:ram . . .
pf subj
ama:rem . . .
ppf subj
ama:ssem . . .
pf inf
ama:sse

you get a lot of homophony, but i like that (!)

bn

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