Re: 501 Verbs

Josh Roth <Fuscian@...> wrote:

>An Eloshtan verb could have, I believe, 52,728 forms. Here's an example of
a
>maximally inflected verb:
>
>yerehenecketifkeskev - (something like) 'and may they have been taught to
you
>[plural] by [other] them'
>
>It's not really more complicated than the corresponding English, but all
the
>morphemes are together in one word.
Wow. 52,728! Perhaps rather than "501 Eloshtan verbs", you could start
with "501 forms of one Eloshtan verb". I wonder if there's a program you
could use to plug in a verb and the affixes and let it generate all the
possible forms.

Just to be a show-off:
Rhean is "sort of" agglutinative. It certainly doesn't have 52,728 verb
forms! It has like six or seven "tenses" with six personal forms each, plus
a few participles. BUT I've given it a lot of suffixes that can change one
part of speech into another with various shades of meaning (a verb can
become a noun in a few ways, or an adjective in a few ways; an adjective
can become a noun in a handful of ways; a noun can become an adjective in
at least a dozen ways... all the different resultant forms have a different
meaning)
And so, I don't usually stick together long long words, but there is the
potential to create beasts like this:

skijagozok'nas'ec'ibzurzagarervomikigios'

"it was like those repeated occasions in which (he) behaves like one who
has been overly burdened with responsibility."

skij-ag-ozok'nas'ec'-ibz-urz-agar-ervo-mik-ig-ios'

skij-   =   too much, over-
ag-...(-ek)   =   to cause to be ...
ozok'nas'ec'   =   vested with responsibility (itself being ozok'nas' + ec')
-ibz(a)   =   passive of -ek verb
-urz   =   "one who is (adjective)"
-agar(ek)   =   to behave like ...
-ervo   =   a regularly occuring event
-mik   =   -like, like (a) ...
-ig(ek)   =   to be (suffixed to adjectives)
-ios'   =   3rd person singular past tense of -ek verb

...
I would like a program like the one I mentioned above, to generate the
forty or fifty verb forms of Rhean. 501 verbs that way wouldn't be too
unreal.

M