Re: Aorist

Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:

>At 3:23 pm +0100 20/3/00, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>>
>>As far as I know, the linguistic use of 'aorist' is to refer to an aspect
>>('punctual', as opposed to imperfect, perfect, continuous, etc...). The
>>grammarian use of 'aorist' is generally: indefinite past tense, as in
>>Greek.
>With the indicative it seemed to the Greeks that either we have something
>happening (she is writing) or something that habitually happens (she
>writes) or else we have a completed state (she has written it [and here it
>is]).  The first two are meanings of the so-called 'present stem' and the
>third is the present of the perfect.
[snip]

Thanks a lot for the explanation. I think it turned out more
complicated than I wished for... ;) I want to distribute all
tense/aspect information over three 'tenses': the present,
the past and the aorist, plus a couple of periphrasis.

I'm not planning on different stems, except for some verbs
with nasal infixion in the present. I don't want Thyllymas
(that's the working name of the lang) to have a verb system
that needs a booklet to be well specified.


My ideas so far:

Present:
        vange  'I am eating', 'I eat'
vagiath yl si  'I have eaten' <- *'Eaten by-me there-is'

 vagiis ei si  'I am eating' (focus on progressive aspect)
                <- *'Eating I there-is'

Past:
         vagen  'I was eating'
vagiath yl sin  'I had eaten', 'I ate (and finished)'
 vagiis ei sin  'I was eating'

Aorist:
          avage 'I used to eat', 'I ate'
vagiath yl isi  'I used to eat (not anymore)'
 vagiis yl isi  'I was used to eating', 'I would eat (and eat)'



Those are more or less the connotations I'd like to give the
'tenses'. Some of them are really not very different, but
unfortunately I still have very little lexicon to make up
a good context for examples.


--Pablo Flores
  http://www.geocities.com/pablo-david/index.html
  ... I cannot combine any characters that the divine Library
  has not foreseen, which in some of its secret tongues do not
  bear some terrible meaning. No-one can articulate a syllable
  not filled of caresses and fears; which is not, in some one
  of those languages, the powerful name of a god...
                   Jorge Luis Borges, _The Library of Babel_