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A'liath: This is completely insane

From:Ian Maxwell <umlaut@...>
Date:Thursday, October 17, 2002, 23:07
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.

- Ian Maxwell
--
C'est la vie, c'est la guerre, c'est la pomme de terre.

CONLANGER CODE: CU v1.1 !lm+ cN:R:N:H a+ y n19:1 !B* A+ E--- L+ N1<2 Im
k-- ia@:@ p@ s@ m- o P-- S--- A'liath

Replies

Peter Clark <peter-clark@...>
Wesley Parish <wes.parish@...>