Re: A'liath: This is completely insane

Ian Maxwell wrote:
>Well. I decided to completely rework my first conlang from scratch a
>while ago, having not really gotten too far with it in the first place.
>My new goal, in a nutshell, was "make Latin look isolating by
>comparison". And, well, if I did make it, it would do that. To a
>completely ridiculous degree.
>
>The basic idea was an extremely fusional language with an enormous
>number of single-morpheme prefixes for inflection. To that end, I
>gradually put together a list of everything the verbs would inflect for.
>
>7 tenses: present, past, future, past-in-past, future-in-past,
>past-in-future, future-in-future
>3 active vs. normal passive vs. adversative passive
>2 polarities (positive vs. negative)
>5 moods: indicative, deontic, interrogative, hypothetical, subjunctive
>42 subject/object number combinations
>20 subject/object person combinations
>2 perfective vs. imperfective
>3 retrospective vs. prospective vs. neither
>2 habituality
>3 inceptive vs. cessative vs. neither
>3 iterativity (at-regular-intervals, at-irregular-intervals, neither)
>4 genders (A'liathian/worldly and animate/inanimate)
>
>Now, multiply all those numbers and see what you get.
>
>152,409,600.
>
>152,409,600 prefixes.
>
>I think I may have bitten off a tad more than I can chew here. I also
>think I'll be working on another, less frightening language for a while.
>One that doesn't have more affixes than words, say.
That actually works out at a mere 76 204 800 combinations, according to my
calculator, and that assumes that you really has four genders - it says '4',
but apparently only three are listed in the parenthesis. Well, still upwards
of 76M distinct prefices is pretty much.

I suspect that a language that has to incode that lot of information in
every verb would turn agglutinative out of sheer self-defense, or the brains
of its speakers'd explode. Go all the way to the agglutinative end of the
spectrum and get a language where every verb starts with a string of twelve
prefices! Would probably erode terribly fast, tho', if the speakers are
human, at least.

BTW, isn't it slightly weird to agree with the number and person with both
subject and object(s?), but agree with only the gender of the subject?

                                                   Andreas

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