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Re: The Future Language

From:Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
Date:Sunday, January 16, 2000, 14:09
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.
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: Classical Latin used inflections for future, e.g., amabô (I shall love) Vulgar Latin abandoned that, replacing it with several constructions, including amâre habeô (I have to love) This became an inflection in Spanish, amaré (amar-he; amar < amâre, he < habeô) Spanish has also begun to use _voy a amar_ (I am going to love) Perhaps a future form of Spanish will turn those into prefixes, _boyamar_, going full circle. 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/ 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/ -- 25 Watikaláf Wakabíf watyánivaf plal 272 http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Conlang/W.html http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-Name: NikTailor