Re: A'liath: This is completely insane

I don't think the number per se is any problem.

Add all of them and see how many you come up with - that's all you need to
start with, after all.

The real fun comes when you start combining them all.  How do they affect each
other?  (Sandhi.)

Wesley Parish

On Friday 18 October 2002 12:10 pm, 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.
>
> - Ian Maxwell
--
Mau e ki, "He aha te mea nui?"
You ask, "What is the most important thing?"
Maku e ki, "He tangata, he tangata, he tangata."
I reply, "It is people, it is people, it is people."