Isnerq Andraeyas:
>I said I hoped to give more details on my still unnamed
>Elvish language's verbal system this weekend. Unfortunately,
>I'm finding myself unable to make up my mind on even very
>basic questions.
>
>What is certain is that there will be a perfect formation
>formed with an infix -u-, creating a diphthong in the stress
>syllable of the verbal root. Eg, _coar_ [kwa(;)r] "eat"
>yields _coaur_ [kwawr] "has eaten".
I guess _uu_ will be pronounced [ow] analogous to _ii_ [ej]?
>There'll probably be an inflected present tense too, leaving
>the basic, uninflected verb to be typically used as past
>imperfect. It'll also be used with auxiliaries indicating
>mood, and other tense-aspects. I can, however, not decide on
>a phonetic form that I like for this present tense affix,
What about putting final fricativization to service?
IIRC it was only fricativization of an initial stop which
was used as a marker in the nominal morphology
>so
>if I stumble on something that just cries out to be a past
>tense marker, I might shuffle things around.
>
>There's an active participial prefix _ma-_, which causes
>fricativization of a following stop. It can be added to
>either an imperfect or a perfect verb stem, giving
>distinctions like _machoar_ "eating" and _machoaur_ "having
>eaten" (the distinction is nicked straight from Sindarin,
>altho the phonetic realization is not).
No worry. A lot of languages have both active and passive
participles in different tenses and aspects. IMHO it is
Western European which is odd in associating active with
present and passive with past participles.
>Presumeably there'll
>also be at least two passive participles ("eaten" and
>"having been eaten"), but the phonetic shapes aren't fixed
>yet.
>
>There'll probably not be any agreement in number or person.
>But clitized pronouns (à la French) is in danger of getting
>thrown in. No doubt they'll wreck phonetic havoc.
Like "I-him-it-give" or like "I-him-give-it"?
The first is decidedly coolest!
>Oh, and stress is on the root syllable. For polysyllabic
>roots, learn to guess.
No stress mark? Well, I guess the native speakers won't need
any. (And the spirit will be happily swimming in the pond...)
> Andreas
/BP 8^)
--
B.Philip Jonsson mailto:melrochX@melroch.se (delete X)
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