Re: Tense marked on nouns
| From: | Sally Caves <scaves@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, June 3, 2004, 19:10 |
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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"?
Teonaht takes the tense particle and prefixes it to the subject pronoun, but
not the subject noun, and it is fast developing a means to keep tense off
the verb altogether, simply by supplying a resumptive pronoun: "the dog a
bone past-he dig up." I'm not sure how any natural language does something
similar (except in English, if I understand you correctly); I DO know that
it was considered unusual enough that Gerald Koenig of the NGL project asked
to borrow it some years ago, which pleased me! :)
Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/verbs.html
----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Bleackley" <Peter.Bleackley@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2004 10:28 AM
Subject: Tense marked on nouns
> Is there any language where tense is marked on a noun rather than the
verb?
> It seems that English is heading towards tense being marked on the
subject,
> but is the process complete in any language?
>
> Pete
>
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