Various Commands (was Uralic Negative Verbs (was RE: "to be" and not to be...)

>>John Vertical wrote:
>>
>> Better yet, it doesn't even exist. (I think a few of the Sami
>> languages at least have theoretical forms for it, but I'm hard-
>>pressed to think of any actual usage for an 1SG imperative.)
>>
>Joe <joe@...> wrote:
>
>Hmm.  "Let me die now [because I'm so happy]"
>             die-1SG.IMP now
>Of course, in English, that's gramatically a 2nd person
>imperative+infinitive construction, but semantically, I would say,
>is a first person imperative.
IIRC, there was a discussion of this a while back.  It involved the
(co)hortative (hortatory subjunctive), jussive, and imperative moods.

According to the Wikipedia entry, cohortative mood is only used in
the first person, jussive in the second and third, and imperative in
the third.  Some languages have all three, some only one.  I would
imagine that if there's only one, it is the imperative, some
periphrastic expression being used for the others.

Senjecan handles this by having only one mood (which I call the
imperative for simplicity), but allowing the verb to be "conjugated"
(there are really no conjugational affixes attached to the verb).

-e is the imperative mood suffix.

mus âxse - let me cleave  x = /C/
tus âxse - cleave!
nus âxse - let him/her cleave

mhus âxse - let us cleave  mh = /m_0/
yus âxse - cleave!
núes âxse - let them cleave

Charlie

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