Re: Existential clauses

From: "John Leland" <Lelandconlang@CS.COM <mailto:Lelandconlang@...>>
Sent: Wednesday, July 14, 2004 6:34 AM
Subject: Re: Existential clauses


 > I am developing an attempt to answer this in Rihana-ye. Rihana-ye has
no main
 > verb meaning to be, so as in your example "I am happy" would be "seba
giva-i" I
 > happy. But there is now a tendency to add  the sufffixes which
usually signal verb
 > tense to the adjective if the sentence is not present tense, so "I
will be
 > happy" would be "seba giva-i-vi" "I happy will" Even the "wi" which
indicating the
 > past which is usually a prefix  can be used as a suffix this way--I
found a
 > sentence in a text lately that read "feveba nibiva-i-wi"
 > meaning "they were afraid" where "nibiva-i"means "afraid" and "wi" is
past,
 > and feveba is the older irregular form of "they."
 > John Leland
 >

 From the grammar:
<< If you would have been smart, ... : Ang va'ongevain* nulingo, ...
   [...]
   *) The apostrophe is a glottal stop here. Unfortunately, this form
does not indicate the conditional, but only subjunctive! >>

It's a mess when not having "to be" but a purely agglutinating language.
However, I thought about adding things to the adjective, too. The
conditional is indicated by a strange rather unsystematic mutation
system, applied to the last consonant of the verb stem. Maybe doing this
with the adjective instead of the verb? The adjective would be "nuligo"
(or "nulico") then. Or applying *everything* to the adjective would give
us "Ang valicóngevain, ...".

A temporary solution can still be found at
http://www.beckerscarsten.de/conlang/ayeri/#todo. Now even with a sound
example.

-- Carsten