Re: Verbs
| From: | Padraic Brown <pbrown@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, March 21, 2000, 19:10 |
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On Mon, 20 Mar 2000, Shreyas Sampat wrote:
>What's the difference between a verbal aspect and a tense?
>As I've concluded, an aspect includes the various odd things you might
>want to tack onto a verb, whereas a tense is strictly a place in
>relative time.
Right. You've gathered the same ideas I have.
>Also, is there precedence for inflection patterns dependent on word
>origin, or is that too artificial?
The Romans did this with many Greek words, using them as Latin words
but declining them sort of in Greek. "musice" was one example,
alongside of a Latinised musica. Some names end up like this as well.
To my knowledge, they only did this with Civilised tongues. I.e., with
Greek. I translated a Vedic hymn into Latin once, and did that with
the borrowed Sanskrit words and the names.
We do it in English as well: we have a criterion and several criteria
(Greek inflexion for number); we have a bacterium and several
bacteria or an alumna/-us and many alumnae/-i (Latin inflection for
gender and number); executor / executrix (Latin inflection for
gender); blond / blonde (French inflection for gender); sire and
monseigneur (defunct Old French case distinction) etc.
As far as conlangs are concerned, there's no reason why they can't do
similar. Doesn't Teonaht do that as well, Sally? I recall a category
of nouns that inflect differently and were gotten from a source other
than proto-Teonaht. Both of my current projects force the borrowed
word into native orthography and morphology:
In Kernu, la jefa (boss)
nom. la jefa y jeif
dat. li jeif lis jefip
acc. la jeffe y jeffes
Spanish xefe (now jefe) from which it was borrowed doesn't distinguish
case.
In Talarian, tefaras (tyrant)
nom. tefaras tefaru tefaras
gen. tefarusha tefarus tefaram
dat. tefaru tefarfas tefarfas
acc. tefaram tefaru tefarams
abl. tefarat
loc. tefarel
instr. tefaru
voc. tefare
The Roman language from which the name Tifiriais was borrowed doesn't
have a dual number and lacks a number of the cases:
nom. Tifiriais Tifiriaii
gen. Tifiriai Tifiriu
dat. Tifiriai Tifiriufa
acc. Tifiria Tifiriais
>I was considering having words native to my language inflect with
>case suffixes, and use prefixes for obviously foreign words, or words
>that the informal register allows but aren't used in polite
>conversation.
You mean the way pretentious writers mark Foreign words like _au
contraire_ and _de rigeur_ by italicising them? I thought you were
after using the Foreign declensional pattern _in_ your conlang! Or am
I not completely getting it?
Padraic.