Re: 501 Verbs

From: "Arthaey Angosii" <arthaey@...>
Subject: 501 Verbs


> >Sally Caves wrote:
> >A single fully inflected verb in Uatakassi would take up several
> >*pages*  :-)  The last time I calculated it out, I think I came up with
> >5,000-some possible inflections.
> <boggle>  Could you give us a taste of what a semi-fully inflected verb
> would look like?  I can't imagine a verb taking up so much space.
This actually doesn't strike me as odd.  Any language that can take more
than one affix on a verb will have an enormous number of possible forms.
Doing a bit of multiplication, here are the number of possible verb
inflections from a single root in some of my languages:

Chovur: 9,216
Morgenón: 1,620

But a noun in Morgenón can have as many as 22,750 different forms, and in
Ilgoen, as many as 1,860.

What you'll find is that all agglutinative languages end up like this.
Looking at some of my other ones, I find:

Tazhnakt: 4
Thanyar: 216
Silven Arlef: 24

Of these, Thanyar and Tazhnakt are somewhat agglutinative, but Silven Arlef
is quite inflectional.  It shows traces of an earlier agglutinative period,
but today is nothing of the sort.  Each verb has (and indeed, must have) a
single ending.