Re: Jovian's Verbs From Hell

En réponse à Christian Thalmann <cinga@...>:

>
> 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.
>
Strangely enough, because German has about as many tense/aspect/mood/voice
distinctions as French. The fact that German has most of them analytic rather
than synthetic doesn't change anything about what they are and how they are
used. Even with Latin you can make a pretty good one-to-one correspondence
between both verbal systems, at least with the finite forms.

>
> In your romlang-native point of view, that is.  =P
>
Of course, I never pretended that a speaker of Japanese wouldn't find it
difficult ;)) .

>
> I'm a non-native speaker too, and I find the isolation helpful.
For the written form yes. I was talking about spoken language, where usually
half the syllables are swallowed in English. Makes your isolated forms rather
difficult to recognise...

  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)...
>
With Latin you need only five forms: 1st person singular present indicative,
2nd person singular present indicative, infinitive, first person present
perfect indicative, supine (and of course remember the personal endings, but in
English once you know the four forms you know nothing unless you know the whole
extent of helping verbs, so the difficulty is very much alike). All the other
forms are straightforwardly derived from them. Latin is not as synthetic as
most of its descendants, and most of its conjugations are actually pretty much
agglutinative. You mustn't get scared that the words are written in one piece
if they are easily parsed.

>
> 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!
>
Except that you are wrong. The pluperfect *is* |amâueram|. It's the future
perfect which is |amâuerô|. Rather than an example of how Latin is complicated,
you just showed an example of how Latin conjugations is straightforward ;))) .

True enough, things are slightly more complex in the subjunctive. But still
it's easily remembered with a few mnemonic rules.

>
> Another difficulty is that the subjunctive present forms of one
> conjugation often look like the indicative forms of another
> conjugation.  /=P
>
You find that a *difficulty*? I think on the contrary that it's one of the
things that make it easy to remember the subjunctive present! Just switch
conjugations! (or rather, take the 1st person present indicative, get rid of
the |o|, and replace it with the endings of the opposite conjugation - with the
opposition -ARE/-ERE,-IRE. Of course, it's a bit simplistic, but as a mnemonic
rule it's extremely easy to remember). Of course, it may be more difficult when
you read a text and you don't know the verb. But even then the shape of the
endings on the verb and its situation in the sentence will give you more than
enough hints to reconstruct its infinitive and look it up in a dictionary.

Of course it might help to have some experience in it, and I can understand
that English students will have difficulties with synthetic conjugations. But
that's mostly because they get scared as soon as they see verbal forms which
are more than two syllables long. They don't realise that the equivalent in
English would probably be at least as long, if not longer, because written with
three of four words rather than one. It's all a matter of choosing the right
point of view.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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