Re: CHAT: (no subject)

En réponse à Christian Thalmann <cinga@...>:

>
> Well, German tenses don't map well onto French ones.
Of course not. I was talking about the number of different forms, not the
mapping. On the other hand, I'd say German and Latin forms map well together,
except for the imperfect.

>
> Our grammatical vocabulary was rather limited, and mostly in German,
> at the end of primary school.  When we had our first Latin lesson,
> we hadn't ever heard of a conjunction or a preposition before, only
> of "Verhältniswörter" and "Bindewörter" etc.  =P
>
I know the problem from learning Dutch ;)) . I still cannot have a scientific
conversation in Dutch because very little of the vocabulary used is
international (unlike in English or French).

>
> Not if you don't instinctively know which conjugation the verb belongs
> to.  ;-)
>
Hence the need to learn the five forms of the verb ;)) .

> Anyway, in Jovian, I'm going to derive a subjunctive auxiliary from
> the Latin subjunctive of |agere|.  I'm already using |ajer| from
> |agere| as the all-purpose verb "to do" in Jovian.
>
Nice idea. Another idea would be to use a particle (like French subjunctive
never appears without "que" in front of it, so much that in French conjugation
tables the "que" is usually added in the subjunctive tenses) and make it part
of the conjugation (like Romanian does for instance).

>
> Aren't there stray e's and i's floating around in the -êre, -îre
> conjugations?
>
That's why I said: take the *first person present indicative* and get rid of
its ending. Those which still have an -i- then (like capere: capio->capi) keep
it in the subjunctive, those which don't (like legere: lego->leg-), don't have
anything added in front of the ending. As I said, a few mnemonic rules are
largely enough.

> Sure, looking up stuff in a dictionary isn't that hard.  I thought
> we were discussing real-time parsing of language.
>
Same. If you know the verb, the parsing will be easy and fast (of course, you
need to know the rules, but that is valid for any language). If you don't, then
even an isolating grammar wouldn't help you anyway (what the point of knowing
which form the verb is in if you don't know what it means anyway? ;)))) ).

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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