Re: 501 Verbs

Josh Roth <Fuscian@...> wrote:

>I'm sure someone could make one (certainly not me), but who needs it?
There is a website somewhere -- probably more than one -- that allows you
to plug in a verb in any of a bunch of languages and it will give you all
the conjugations. I think it would be cool to have such a thing for Rhean.
If I had a website for Rhean, I'd put it there.

>That is pretty cool. I think you're underestimating the number of possible
>forms. Just with seven tenses and six person/number categories you have 42
>forms, then if you add on just the possibility to be passive or active, to
>have 'skij' or not, and to have 'mik' or not, you wind up with 346 forms,
and
>I'm sure there are more variations you could have.
But all those 346 (I got 336 when I multiplied it) would not be verb forms.
A lot of them would be nouns or adjectives or forms of other verbs stuck on
to those.
I did not estimate the number of possible compounded words available by
turning a verb into an adjective, then the adjective into a verb or a noun
and so on and so on... because this actually gives INFINITE possible forms.
I'm not kidding: Wherever you stopped, there would always be something you
could add that would add a meaning of "to cause to be..." (sac.ek) or "the
one which does..." (nok) or "looking like a..." (vud)
I see where you were going with the math there, but the classifiers like
skij- aren't conjugations any more than "over-" "re-" or "un-" are in
English. Also, the passive/active difference would not double the number of
forms since the only passive form is an adjective participle. That -ig.ek
which allowed it to conjugate actually suffixes to ANY adjective, and is
thus not a conjugation of the original verb but a new verb formed from an
adjective.

The "conjugations" are counted like this:
An infinitive = 1
Six forms each for the real past, present and future = 18
Six forms each for the hypothetical past, present and future = 18
Six forms in the imperative = 6
Past participle, present participle, passive participle = 3
Gerund =1

Which gives 47 straight-up conjugations. Only 42 of these are actually
still "verbs", as the infinitive is treated as a noun (and declines!), the
participles are all adjectives, and the gerund is an adverb.

The monster word, rather than being a "conjugation" of one verb, actually
becomes a noun, adjective, verb, adjective, noun, verb, noun, adjective,
and verb in turn before that verb's ONLY conjugation -ios' is applied.

M