Re: Tense marked on nouns

At 20:10 03/06/2004, you wrote:
>In Teonaht, tense and aspect are frequently marked on the subject pronoun.
>I'd be interested in seeing what you're thinking of in English.  "I've"?
>"he's"?  "Pete's"?  as in "Pete's going to school"?
Yes. I was considering that in future they might evolve from contractions
to inflections.

I had a nasty idea the other day for a language where word order is free,
and the first word of the sentence is marked for tense, regardless of its
part of speech. The idea is that the language was originally VSO, and sound
changes obscure verbal inflections. Auxiliary verbs are then used to mark
tense. The auxiliary verb takes the sentence initial position, and the
position of the main verb becomes free. The Auxiliary verbs are then
reduced to clitics, and further sound changes merge them with the words
they bind to.

Pete