Re: A break in the evils of English (or, Sturnan is beautiful)

Jesse Bangs sekalge:
>At the risk of asking the obvious, it's an IE-based lang, then?
Right.

---
And what mean these?  I find this distribution of tenses a bit
surprising,
especially since you appear to have more distinctions in the future than
the past.  The future tense is marginal, semantically and typologically,
and languages almost never make distinctions in the future that they
don't
make in the past.  So if there's a near-future tense, I'd also expect a
near-past, at least.  And "aorist" is a mighty flexible term--what does
it
mean here?
---
The near future is mainly used for imperatives. The general imperative
"ta" will probably disappear, and this tense will become more
specialized.
Aorist here is describing long-term or habitual actions. It seems there
are distinctions and possibilities I haven't even thought about. (I knew
that.)

---
Hmmm.  I don't think that this interpretation makes sense--I would have
guessed at "Did I have to plough the field?"  Where do you get "you wish"
from?  Why does the imperative require that gloss?  At any rate, this
doesn't strike me as particularly flashy--imperative and interrogative go
together quite nicely.
---
It was sort of idiomatic a long time ago.

Oh, I did make a mistake in my X-SAMPA. What I wrote as E was actually 2.
|ei| was originally /ej/ but eventually became /2/.

Chris Wright