Re: The Future Language

>From: Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
>Subject:      Re: The Future Language
>To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
>Status: R
>
>Artem Kouzminykh wrote:
>> Well, I may be very probably be wrong, because of my ignorance, but I
>> thought it is well known tendency in, for example, Romance natlangs' tenses.
>> Now the majority of them are compound, i.e. analytical, and in Latin almost
>> all tenses were synthetical, i.e. they were formed by verbs' flexions. AFAIK
>> the tendency of more wide use of compound tenses instead of simple (=
>> synthetical)can be found in all Romance langs too.
>=Nik said:
>
>There's a cyclic phenomenon, inflections tend to be lost, replaced by
>analytical forms, which then tend to become suffixes, which may then be
>lost.  For instance, from the history of Spanish:
>
> (example deleted)
>Perhaps a future form of Spanish will turn those into prefixes,
>_boyamar_, going full circle.
>
And,
Markus Miekk-oja <torpet@...> said:
>
>The same evolutions don't occur in every language. And the evolutions of
>languages are not predictable.
>
>Languages have existed thousands of years. If the evolution toward
>analytical was universal, no language would have *any* affixes...
>
NGL currently has a highly developed analytic/synthetic/latin-style
verb system and also a highly developed
isolating/analytic/english-style one; that I wrote. There is an analytic
<---> synthetic equilibrium equation possible there, with an unknown
equilibrium constant. At least NGL is prepared for any eventuality.

Sometimes in an iterative cyclical process there are wild oscillations
that break the cycles. There is an associated change in form of the
whole system. I can't imagine what a language without meaningful
particles attached to the verb, or free standing meaningful particles
close to the verb which serve the same function. Unless perhaps the
"strong" verbs could be extended to include even mode and case,
producing an extremely irregular and complex system, at least for the
core (frequent) verb-concepts. It would have to be a product of design,
a conlang, as it seems unlikely evolve from a natlang or it would
have.  Hmmm... is this the future?


Nik:
>My future English conlang has turned auxillaries into prefixes, so that
>I'm gonna see would be something like
>
>/e~Ge~se/, where /e~Ge~/ represents the prefix indicating "1st person
>singular future" and /se/ is "see", you're gonna see is /jEGe~se/, he's
>gonna see is /ege~se/, and so on; while "I see", "you see", and "he
>sees" are, respectively, /Ese/, /ise/, /ese/
There is some parallelism to my vector tense Nilenga NGL dialect which
has extended the english contractions greatly and always _allows_
agglutination due to the phonology of the language. Using <si> for your
<se> I get:

mi ev si (I'm gonna see) agglutinates to
mievsi

mi fu si (I will see) agglutinates to

mifusi       or contracts to

mif  si  (I'll see)

vuevsi::- you're gonna see.
haevsi::- he's gonna see

vufsi::- you'll see
zasfusi::- they (fem) will see.


>
>P.s., note that I solved the problem I'd asked about where the "gonna"
>was lost, instead of deleting voiced intervocalic stops, I merely made
>them into fricatives; the stop in /ege~se/ is caused by the fact that
>there was a /z/ when the fricativization [I can't remember the right
>word] occured, and was later lost, the small number of situations like
>that have created a slight phonemic difference between /g/ and /G/
>
>--
I should know, but what does the ~ stand for?

Best,

Jerry