Re: Question: Verb Paradigms

From: "David Peterson" <DigitalScream@...>
>     Has anyone every invented a language that has internal vowel change
for
> any type of tense/aspect marking on the verb?  I did so once in Megdevi
where
> changing the short vowels from schwas to [I]'s you got the perfective,
> regardless of tense, thus:
>
> ?oj dZarabi: I'm eating.
> ?oj dZIrIbi: I've eaten.
>
>     However, what I'm really interested in is stuff like German and
English
> with "sing/sang" and "sehe/sah".  I always try to come up with some sort
of
> language that does things like this, but I'm always disappointed with the
> result because it ends looking too regular and/or too artificial.  Are
there
> any out there?
Hadwan has it, and its descendants also.

e.g.
    gímó    [gi:"mu:]   "I go"
    gemen   ["gEmEN]    "I was going"
    gontsen ["gUNtsEN]  "I went"
    gigomen [gI"gUmEN]  "I had gone"

In one of the (yet-unnamed) descendant languages this reduces to:
    gihmy   [gim"mY]    "I go"[1]
    gyhse   ["gY:s@]    "I went"[2]

In proto-Hadwan the past tense had a "stronger" main vowel (usually *o) than
the present and future.   There's about seven different patterns of vowel
change, generalized here:
http://personal.southern.edu/~alrivera//images/kirumb_laut.gif
('NML' = present, future; 'IMF' = imperfect; 'PRT' = past, perfect)
So 'gímó' would be a 3i verb,[3] even though it's got a long vowel in the
present tense for some reason.

But the vowel change stops being productive around the Hadwan stage...  for
example, later we have it losing ground:

    nimy    [ni"mY]     "I take"  < nimó
    nimre   ["nimr@]    "I took"

where a "weak" formation where -r attaches to the present to create a past
has replaced the expected *nyhse < nósem/nontsen.

    *Muke!
[1] Sound change file says [gimmY], but vocab file spells it gihm- and not
gimm-.  I forget why.
[2] <gyhse> actually from <gósem>, the parent dialect's equivalent of
<gontsen>, both from *gom-s-m.
[3] I don't really number verbs regularly, I just did that chart for
organization's sake.