Re: Verbal distinctions

Quoting Chris Bates <christopher.bates@...>:

> Its partly my fault in the first place because as an example I gave him
> "I wish/want that he had lived" I think... which is not a perfect
> example, and "I wish that he had been alive" conveys what I was trying
> to say much better. :) The wish/want thing came from the assumption (I
> don't know where it came from, I might have just conjured it from thin
> air) that the things are the same in his conlang. So its all my fault
> you see. ;)
Tairezazh has distinctions in this semantic field*, but they're not coterminus
with the English ones; the wish/want distinction cannot be kept in an
idiomatic translation.

* Why do we say semantic _field_? We ought to be taking about semantic
_spaces_, since they frequently have more than two axes.

>  Latin and Romance tenses (and moods and aspects) can be a nightmare...
> how common is a subjunctive-like mood in non IE languages? For that
> matter, is the subjunctive mood common in other non-romance IE languages
> since English has it? I can't remember from the little German I was
> taught at school whether German has a subjunctive or not...
German has it, altho they call it "Konjunktiv". Swedish has it too, altho it's
noticeably deader than in German. The only (morphemically distinguishible)
subjunctive form that's really common is _vore_ "were", and even that can be
replaced with formally indicative _var_ "was" (altho this arguably has
acquired a secondary meaning as subjunctive present). I use more subjunctives
than most people that I know, and there's less than a dozen subjunctive forms
I use with any frequency.

(There also a couple of "frozen" subjunctives, where the corresponding
indicatives are never seen. The best example may be the verb _att töra_, the
only form of which I use in normal speech is the subjunctive _torde_.)

                                                           Andreas