Re: relative tense and beyond!

On Tue, 23 Mar 1999, Jim Grossmann wrote:

> >I was thinking perhaps of adding some sort of indicator of perfection or
> >imperfection of the action.  Past and futurity could be indicated, as you
> >say, lexically if necessary; or they could use the perfect tense as a
> >rough-and-ready past (much as Biblical Hebrew does).
>
>
> JG -- I don't see why not.   Actions can be completed in both the vivid now
> or in realms-of-what-is-not, like the past, future, dreams, hypotheses, etc.
>
> >I'm thinking agglutinating here, perhaps based off of some Native American
> >languages.
>
>
> JG -- Strange, though I've never contemplated making an agglutinating
> conlang, it seems to me that agglutination would be pretty elegant from a
> conlanger's perspective.    No need for tables, tables, and more tables as
> in highly inflected languages.   No need for complex clause constructions
> that you need to free up word order in isolating languages.
Surfing around for Turkish and Cherokee information got me interested in
it.  That, and studying Esperanto -- oni tiu rikanus, ricevos forkon en
la okulo -- which has such a wonderful ability to turn "pretty" into
"damned butt-ugly!"  (uh, bela into, I guess malbelega)  Of course, I
don't want to be that artificial.

> I guess what I'd watch out for first thing with an agglutinating conlang is
> lists, lists and more lists of functive morphemes, and any restrictions on,
> or meaning changes resulting from, changing the order of said morphemes.
Well, now, that's the pleasure of an agglutinating language.  Of course,
there will probably be a fairly rigid set order in which morphemes must
come, probably ripped off unabashedly from Cherokee.

> The latter issue becomes more significant if you decide to chuck the
> potential for free word order and make your agglutinating grammatical
> morphemes part of a language with LOTS of bound morphemes:   say, one or two
> phonological words per clause or sentence.
That is a real temptation, one which I'm still wrestling with.  I love
having entire words that can mean "the ugly hippo danced with the green
tunafish in the morning at my house", but then I start to wonder -- is
such an enormous strings of morphemes actually a word?  What defines a
word?  Why is "tunafish" different from "fish of tuna" or "fishoftuna"?

> Others could point out a lot more options:   your ultimate choices and
> creations will be interesting.
Well, I hope so.  ;)

--Patrick