Re: Tensed Pronouns (was: Tagalog ...)

At 10:45 PM 2/16/99 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
>Tim Smith scripsit:
>
>> That sounds like Hausa, which has the tense marking on the subject pronoun
>> rather than on the verb.
>
>Here are some "tensed pronouns" from a rather better-known lang:
>
>Tense/mood              1sg     2sg+pl  3sg/m   3sg/f   3sg/n   1p      3p
>
>Unmarked                @j      j@      i       Si      @t      wi      De
>Conditional             @jd     j@d     id      Sid     @t@d    wid     Dejd
>Immediate future        Ajm@n@  jug@n@  ig@n@   Sig@n@  Ig@n@   wig@n@  Dejg@n@
>Future                  Ajl     jul     il      Sil     It@l    wil     Dejl
>
Yes!  That's exactly what I was talking about in my remarks later in the
same post about the likely future evolution of English.  Today's colloquial
spoken language becomes tomorrow's "standard".  (Of course, for languages
that have a standardized writing system, the spelling may lag far behind the
actual language.)  I was actually thinking that the forms you've listed,
combining subject agreement with tense/modality, would themselves be
prefixed to the verb stem, and that object pronouns would be suffixed to it.
Thus you'd end up with something a lot like modern colloquial French (which,
if you ignore the archaic spelling which puts word boundaries where
phonologically there are none, starts to look really agglutinative in its
verb morphology, sort of like the Bantu languages or like many Native
American languages), except that the object-agreement markers would be
suffixes instead of prefixes.

In fact, one of my back-burner conlang projects is a future language that I
call neo-Anglic, which does precisely this -- except that I've made some
fairly radical simplifications (like abolishing gender) which I justify by
saying that it's descended from an English-based creole rather than directly
from English.

-------------------------------------------------
Tim Smith
timsmith@global2000.net

The human mind is inherently fallible.  It sees patterns where there is only
random clustering, overestimates and underestimates odds depending on
emotional need, ignores obvious facts that contradict already established
conclusions.  Hopes and fears become detailed memories.  And absolutely
correct conclusions are drawn from completely inadequate evidence.
        - Alexander Jablokov, _Deepdrive_ (Avon Books, 1998, p. 269)