Re: Jovian's Verbs From Hell

--- 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

     http://www.informalmusic.com/latinsoc/verbs/

I realized most of those wouldn't survive the phonetic mangling of
Jovian.  Initially, I had planned to keep the perfect tense rather
than the imperfect, but I realized the verb stems would become
unrecognizable and ambiguous in Jovian's restrictive phonology.

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...



> > Irregular   haever /"hajv@r/ "to have"
> >
> >             Singular                Plural
> >      1.P    hau    /haw/            havime  /h@"vi:m/
> >      2.P    haese  /hajs/           havise  /h@"vi:s/
> >      3.P    haefte /hEft/           haene   /hajn/
> >
> >             Participle: haente, -is /hEnt/
>
> I like this a lot! Irregulars are what make life interesting. I'm curious,
> how did you get the glides in the 2sg and 3pl forms?
Well, the |ae| diphthong here derives from the dropped final-syllable
|e| in |habes|, |habet| and |habent| flavoring the stressed vowel.
It happens all the time in Jovian, e.g. machina -> maenca, dominus ->
doemu etc.

The reason why |ae| is pronounced /E/ in the 3.P and the participle is
simply because it is in a closed syllable, and Jovian phonology
consequently prevents superheavy syllables.



> I would hardly call this system evil--it looks pretty straightforward, and
> doesn't have even the evilness of many of the modern Romlangs. Perhaps
> there's more I haven't seen, though.
As I've said, it's less evil than certain other langs, and the main
evilness was the headaches it caused me until I had finally settled
on a system that was both fluid enough for Jovian and unambiguous
enough (I don't want many important words to become identically-
sounding monosyllables...  I still have no idea how French or Irish
can deal with it!).

For example, many forms of the verb |ire| look and sound identical
to the 3rd person pronoun.  I accepted the ambiguity on the grounds
that |ire| is always followed by an infinitive, but the 3rd person
pronoun mostly isn't.



-- Christian Thalmann

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