Re: Subject/Object participles

On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 8:24 PM, Logan Kearsley <chronosurfer@...> wrote:

> nail as the object of 'hammer'. As far as I can tell, present
> participles in English are always subject-oriented, while past
> participles are always object oriented, and altering that requires
> circumlocutions like "the nail which is being hammered" to get 'nail'
> to be the object in the present tense. But one could just as well have
> a system that marks the tense/aspect/etc. of a participle separately
> from whether the thing it modifies is a subject or object. So, what
> languages do that, and how? And is it done in natural languages, or
> just conlangs?
Esperanto:

la kuranta viro = the running man
la martelata najlo = the being-hammered nail

with -int and -ont for past and future active/subject participles,
and -it and -ot for past and future passive/subject participles.

I would guess Ido and some other close imitators of Esperanto
have the same or a similar system.  The other auxlangs and
engelangs I'm familiar with don't obligatorily distinguish tense
or aspect either in verbs or participles.

In fact, I think Esperanto distinguishes tense in its verb
system and aspect in its participle system; though the
participles are often glossed or introduced as past,
present and future, they (or at least the -i(n)t and -a(n)t forms)
are more like perfective and progressive aspect
than past and future tense, the way they're used.  But
whether it's tense or aspect, either way there's orthogonal
marking of subject/object and of tense or aspect.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/

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