Re: Noun tense

When I introduced myself last week and gave example of Bendeh, it had
recently suffered a syntactic shift in which a set of tense and aspect
prefixes moved off the head-word of the predicate to sentence-initial
position as an auxiliary.  This solved all sorts of problems in marking
where clauses began and ended, but it had a grave downside: only one NP in
the clause (the predicate) could be marked for tense and aspect.  How
distressingly IE!

Now all the talk about noun-tense has motivated me to axe the auxiliaries
and return tense-aspect markers to their rightful original locations on
NPs.  This is as it should be -- not at all unexpected or unusual in
Bendeh -- because Bendeh, after all, has no verbs.

Before my regrettable ideological deviation, you see, all NPs could have
tense and aspect markers, which allowed extremely succinct expression of
such crucial information as:

Pambab jekzxuf pelcup.  ["zx" = /Z/]
That-which-habitually-becomes-a-bird was-eating what-was-formerly-grain.

This, in my opinion, is true noun tense and aspect.  Returning to this
system has brought in its wake a wholesale revision of the grammar.  One
added benefit is that certain expressions in the language have gotten
gloriously agglutinative (see below).  It has also rendered it necessary
to recast my introductory sentences:

Rir evop-yk maltyf.
opposite of-love [is] not-enmity

Hasiwarulfusor.
this-[is]-that-one-would:not-have:concern.

I find that second sentence immensely satisfying to say (accent on the
last syllable, please).

I have been working away on a reasonably complete description of the
grammar, which I will post on the web sometime in August.  For now I will
bid the listserv a brief adieu, since I will be out of email touch for
about two weeks while I move my entire life 3000 miles across the
continent of North America.  I hope that the informants whither I go are
as fluent in Bendeh as those here ;-)

- Nat