Re: # of possible verb declensions (was gotten, boughten)

Jake X sikyal:

> <<This is why I hate English.  5,104 different possible constructions of the
> same verb.>>
> Assuming you made up that number (there can't be THAT many), I'm starting to
> wonder what number of verb forms there ARE for any English verb. Has anyone
> actually studied this?
I'm not sure that I understand the original question, because there only 4
forms of any regular English verb, 5 forms for the strong verbs (most of
them, anyway), and 8 forms for "to be," the most heavily inflected word in
English. That's hardly taxing.

To count the periphrastics, we calculate:

number of modals x perfect w/ have x progressive w/ be
9 x 2 x 2 = 36

Thirty-six possible configurations of mood-aspect-tense isn't really all
that many.  Most European languages, if not most languages worldwide, have
more. The English system is especially friendly because the elements are
all periphrastic, so all of these possible configurations are derived from
a very small number of combinatory elements.

> What is the average number of possible verb forms in
> a said conlang? Mine (elanagauo) is the following:
I won't even try to list all of the ones for Yivrian.  However, the total
is calculated by:

8 modal prefixes * 6 aspects * 3 voices * 9 tense/negation elements * 4
phases = 5184 possible forms.  Once again, however, in this agglutinating
lang the number of elements to be memorized is rather small--it's just the
permutations that get large.

Oh, but that's not a proper count, I just realized, since you can use more
than one modal prefix at once. Instead of 8 modal prefixes, I need 2^7 in
my calculation, which gives 82,944 forms. So there.

> PRESENT
> totatu* / I eat
> sotatu / you eat
> kotatu / he/she/it eats
> dotatua/ we eat
> shotatua / you pl. eat
> gotatua / they eat
Euphonic.  I see that number agreement is circumfixual--very interesting,
and reminiscent of French. The phonology reminds me of Japanese.

> FUTURE
> satotatuo / I ate
> sasotatuo / you ate
> etc., does not change for plural
And the future has a prefix! Wonderful. Do you have a historical reason?
And have you thought about the analysis? I'm tempted to call the prefixes
clitics, which makes the status of the future rather uncertain.

Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/

"If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are
perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in
frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."
--G.K. Chesterton