Re: EAK prepositions

Hi!

R A Brown writes:
> Henrik Theiling wrote:
>...
> >>I have also been working on EAK verbs, but this has thrown up a few
> >>problems. Those with any knowledge of the somewhat complex ancient
> >>Greek verb system will, I'm sure, not be surprised. However, I hope
> >>the first verb page will be on site within the next week.
> >  I think I faced similar problems in Terkunan, but had a lot of
> > possibilities from Romance natlangs to choose analytical verb forms.
> > Quite a few things have changed from Latin to modern Romance
> > introducing analytical forms.
>
> The Romance languages managed to introduce a whole lot more irregular
> present tenses! I remember years ago I wrote a Prolog parser for Latin
> verbs. I was fairly straightforward. I then started to adapt it for
> French - but never finished it!
Hehe. :-)

Ok, I cheated a bit and just dropped the present tense verb endings.
At least *spoken* French comes quite close to this.

(I currently have an -a ending on verbs, but I am not sure it will be
retained (it drops in front of vowels anyway).)

>...
> > Have you decided whether totally regular agglutination would be
> > acceptable?
>
> Um - I see, agglutination as opposed to inflexion?
>
> I am attempting to stick strictly to no _grammatical_ affixes, so I'm
> not contemplating agglutination à la Esperanto or Volapük. Once
> agglutination is accepted, things can get fiendishly
> complicated. Volapük's verbal apparatus or all very regular and is
> entirely agglutinative, but it ain't exactly easy.
Indeed.  I suppose I decided that very few affixes are ok and will not
result in long suffix chains.  But even derivational affixes can
produce long strings, once permitted: e.g. _posabretatz_ is already
possible now: pos-abre-tat-z (ok, -z is grammatical).

Purely isolating compounding might be hard and awkward for Latin or
Greek-based langs, however.  Dunno.

> > What about derivational affixes?
>
> To derive abstract nouns from verbs etc.? Yes, it will probably do
> so. But that's for the future  :)
I will be watching you! :-)))

**Henrik