Re: My Grammatical Sketch (again!)

Patrick Dunn wrote:

>This isn't meant as a criticism, just a question that also applies to my
>language (Hatasoe).  I have a trouble with imperatives; aren't they
>usually, in natural languages, very unmarked?  So, in Spanish, they're
>just the root and the "theme vowel", in OE they're just the root without
>the infinitive marker, and in Latin, again, they're just the root and the
>"theme vowel" (I don't know if that's an actual term or not; I once saw it
>in a book that talked about Latin, and picked it up).
We had a thread about imperatives a little while ago.  While it's true that
the imperative is the least marked verb form in many languages, there are
also plenty of languages where the imperative is marked morphologically.
Malagasy, for example:

        misotro   "drink" (indic)
        misotroa          "drink!" (imp)

Tokana marks the imperative by replacing the final "-a" of the verb stem
(similar to the 'theme vowel' in Romance) with the imperative suffix "-o":

        sepa      "drink" (indic)
        sepo      "drink!" (imp)

(Note that the "-o" imperative suffix is a direct rip-off of Sindarin.
What can I say?  I wanted a suffix that consisted of a single vowel, and
all of the other vowels in the language were taken already.  :-))

Matt.