Re: Rebellious words!

En réponse à João Ricardo Oliveira <hokstein@...>:

> Let them run free in the fields, admiring birds and singinf The Sound
> Of
> Music. You can always coin other words to take their place.
>
> IMHO, a past tense marker is much more useful than a completion marker.
> But
> maybe it's some cultural bias of mine.
>
A very big linguistic bias of yours indeed. Actually, it's easier to argue that
a completion marker is more useful then a past tense marker. Past tense markers
are usually whether very imprecise (time of action is better and more precisely
described through adverbs of time like "yesterday", "tomorrow", "later", "five
years ago") or actually mix time and aspect (like the preterite and imperfect
which I think Portuguese has, one indicating a punctual action, the other a
continuous one). On the other hand, completion is an aspect which is a bit more
difficult to describe with an adverb (French for instance marks the perfect
with the present, or with complicated structures) unless you create an adverb
specifically for it (but that's cheating ;))) ). And yet it's often very
important to know whether the action is finished or not, more so than when the
action actually occured (because a finished action usually has consequences,
and that's what matters, not that the action happened somewhen in the past).

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

It takes a straight mind to create a twisted conlang.