Re: Tense marked on nouns

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark P. Line" <mark@...>

> Sally Caves said:
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Mark P. Line" <mark@...>
> >
> > Only in some conlangs? :)
>
> Right. None of the proposed natlang examples I've seen (here or in the
> literature) qualify as clause-level tense.
>
> > elry krespr, "past-I write"?  (I wrote)  Unless
> > I
> > still misunderstand you here.
>
> If the morpheme meaning 'past' in this example is an affix attached to the
> personal pronoun, then this would be an example of tense marked on
> pronouns.
It is.  -el- cannot stand by itself as a word, it must be affixed.  You may
have missed my first message to Peter when he asked about tense marked on
nouns; I responded that in T. tense is marked on pronouns, and that NGL
borrowed the custom.  I don't know what's happened to NGL.  Is it going
strong?

> If you can do the same thing with nouns, then that would be an
> example of tense marked on nouns -- which was what we were looking for in
> this thread.
I conjectured (at some blahblahblah, the AS FOR MY CONLANG kind of post)
that the tense affix could be attached to articles and other determiners:
'Past'-the man VERB, 'future'-a man VERB, 'habitual'-my writing VERB etc.  I
would relegate this weird custom to a dialect, though, because the article
already takes enough affixes:  ilid zef, "of the man," alid zef, "of my
man," and so forth.  Teonaht will probably resist putting a tense affix on a
noun; the only one it tolerates at this point is the dual, the plural, and
the genitive.  Gosh, wouldn't that be weird... to INFIX a tense affix
between plural prefix and noun?  No... it would make the words too long
which are long already, and too many of them start out with el, es, om, etc.
Sometimes you have to know when to stop embellishing.

Sally
scaves@frontiernet.net
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teonoun.html
papperlapapp! :)