--- In conlang@y..., Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@F...>
wrote:
> Strangely enough, because German has about as many
tense/aspect/mood/voice
> distinctions as French. The fact that German has most of them
analytic rather
> than synthetic doesn't change anything about what they are and how
they are
> used. Even with Latin you can make a pretty good one-to-one
correspondence
> between both verbal systems, at least with the finite forms.
Well, German tenses don't map well onto French ones. For example,
German perfect is only used in the present frame (to express
anteriority), not in the past frame as French. Also, the whole
aspect distinction of French (imparfait vs passé composé) is not
present in German: there are only some optional adverbs (e.g.
"gerade") that express imperfective aspect, but the verb itself
makes no such distinction. It's perfectly valid to say "Als ich
kam, stand die Tür offen" whereas French and English would require
the imperfect for the second verb.
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
The teacher was rather surprised at that, so my primary school may
not have been representative. Anyway, we did get to hear a lot more
German grammar in secondary school, with international terms this
time. =P
> > I'm a non-native speaker too, and I find the isolation helpful.
>
> For the written form yes. I was talking about spoken language, where
usually
> half the syllables are swallowed in English. Makes your isolated
forms rather
> difficult to recognise...
I wouldn't have noticed that as difficult, but then, my L1-L3 all
have short verb forms and mostly isolating features. (Counting
Swiss German as L1, German as L2 and English as L3 =P). Or maybe
it's just that I started with English at the age of 9, where the
human mind is still much more receptive for languages than later on.
> Except that you are wrong. The pluperfect *is* |amâueram|. It's the
future
> perfect which is |amâuerô|. Rather than an example of how Latin is
complicated,
> you just showed an example of how Latin conjugations is
straightforward ;))) .
Just another one on my long list of backfired examples. ;-)
At least it's not really my fault this time. The professional-looking
Latin conjugation tables I was using to build Jovian had it the other
way round. I'm not at home currently, so I don't have the link at
hand.
> True enough, things are slightly more complex in the subjunctive.
But still
> it's easily remembered with a few mnemonic rules.
>
> >
> > Another difficulty is that the subjunctive present forms of one
> > conjugation often look like the indicative forms of another
> > conjugation. /=P
> >
>
> You find that a *difficulty*? I think on the contrary that it's one
of the
> things that make it easy to remember the subjunctive present!
Not if you don't instinctively know which conjugation the verb belongs
to. ;-)
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.
> Just switch
> conjugations! (or rather, take the 1st person present indicative,
get rid of
> the |o|, and replace it with the endings of the opposite conjugation
- with the
> opposition -ARE/-ERE,-IRE. Of course, it's a bit simplistic, but as
a mnemonic
> rule it's extremely easy to remember).
Aren't there stray e's and i's floating around in the -êre, -îre
conjugations?
> But even then the shape
of the
> endings on the verb and its situation in the sentence will give you
more than
> enough hints to reconstruct its infinitive and look it up in a
dictionary.
Sure, looking up stuff in a dictionary isn't that hard. I thought
we were discussing real-time parsing of language.
-- Christian Thalmann
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