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Re: juvenalia (was: Fictional auxlangs as artlangs)

From:Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
Date:Wednesday, December 17, 2008, 20:28
Two things struck me about Esperanto when I discovered it (at age 13 in 1981
or thereabouts): the utility of lexically indicating the part of speech, and
the utter simplicity of varying just a single vowel to get the different
verb tenses. I immediately seized upon that pattern and applied it to my
nascent conlang, combined with the part of speech marking so that not only
verb tenses but also noun cases were differentiated by a single vowel.  So
all nouns ended in -wa in the nominative; as I recall, the other cases were
dative -we dative, accusative -wi, locative -wo, and instrumental -wu, while
dropping the -wX syllable entirely yielded an adjective that functioned as
the genitive.  The verbs used -yez for the infinitive form; again IIRC, the
conjugations were -ya for past, -ye for present, -yi for future, and -yo for
imperative mood.

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Ph.D. <phil@...>