Re: A question about connecting sentences

Larry Schelin wrote:

>Anyway, I was working on a language, and I wanted to ask for
>suggestions. The language, 'Bitha', for now is mostly agglutinative,
>with suffixes, infixes and prefixes, and a SVO word order. The thing I'm
>having trouble is with sticking two verbs in a sentence, like the
>english "I want to go home." Here's the ideas I've had so far...
>
>Ju mi yia'di vidh itsu ju mi baidi vidh itsiratsah.
>
>Ju(I-pron) mi(tense marker #1-affirmative) yia'di(want-verb) vidh(tense
>marker #2-present) itsu(that-pron) ju(I-pron) mi(tense marker #1)
>biadi(verb-go) vidh(tense marker) itsira(noun-home) -tsah(preposition
>marker-to)
>
>That seemed ok, but it ends up a little long, so I tried this...
>
>Ju mi yia'di vidh itsu midzi baidai vidh itsiratsah.
>Ju(I-pron) mi(tense marker #1-affirmative) yia'di(want-verb) vidh(tense
>marker #2 present) itsu(pron- that) midzi(tense marker #1-
>affirmative+participle (mi + infix -idz-))  baidai (go-verb) vidh(tense
>marker #2-present) itsira(noun-home) -tsah(preposition marker-to)
>
>That's a little shorter, but still a little long. Can anyone suggest
>another way to accomplish this
Well, as someone already pointed out, you could use affixes in place of
certain auxiliary verbs.  This is what my conlang Tokana does for
"want":

        Me eta moke
        I go home-Dat

        Imeh etuha moke
        to-me go-want home-Dat

Here "want" is indicated by the suffix "-uh".

An alternative, which may be more in keeping with the structure of
Bitha, would be to just eliminate the subject and tense markers from the
embedded clause, giving:

        Ju mi yia'di vidh itsu bidzaidai itsiratsah

(Notice I stuck the participial infix inside the embedded verb, "baidai".
I'm not sure if I stuck it in the right place, but you get the idea...)

You could even take this one step further and axe the complementizer
"itsu", giving:

        Ju mi yia'di vidh bidzaidai itsiratsah

Finally, you could stick "yia'di" and "baidai" together to form a sort
of compound verb which appears between the first and second tense
markers:

        Ju mi yia'di baidai vidh itsiratsah
        "I want+go to-home"

If that's too radical, you could at least streamline things by getting rid
of either "itsu" or the participial infix "-idz-".  You don't really need both,
it seems to me.

Tokana forms embedded clauses by adding a suffix to the verb called the
"dependent" suffix (Dep).  Compare:

        eta-kia mok-e
        go-2p home-Dat
        "you go home"

        eta-n-kia mok-e
        go-Dep-2p home-Dat
        "that you go home"

Examples:

        Etakia moke ilohfoi
        "You are going home tomorrow"

        Imeh iona etankia moke ilohfoi
        "I know that you are going home tomorrow"

Anyhow, that's some stuff to think about...

Matt.