Re: Case/Tense question

Nik Taylor wrote:

> I'm working on Terra Novan, a descendant of English, and I've come into
> a problem with the Future.  Word-final l's were lost, so I'll, you'll,
> etc. merged with I, you, etc.  I first thought I'd simply replace it
> with "gonna", unfortunately, there's a problem with that, too.  I became
> /e/, while I gonna became /egEn/ --> /egE~/ --> /ege~/ --> /ege/ --> /e/
> (/E~/ and /O~/ were both raised and /&~/ moved backwards to /A~/; also
> intervocalic voiced stops were lost).  I think the other persons would
> continue to distinguish future from present, but I'd still like to find
> an alternative.  What would be reasonable to replace the lost future?
> Perhaps re-creating the "gonna" construction by using /gu/ (go), thus
> /ese/ = I see, /egu se/ = I will see, or /egwe se/ (/gwe/ = /gu/ + /e/ <
> /iN/), but I don't like the idea of simply recreating the current form.
> What other kinds of constructions might be used?
Well, "gonna" in current English is really aspectual rather than tensive (is
that the word?).  What you might consider is eliminating tense entirely from
the grammatical system and substituting a simple three way contrast between
prospective / aorist / perfective aspects instead.

For prospective, you could do as you say above, but grammaticalize _gwe_
into the morphological structure of the verb, and maybe person too, so that
you'd get a paradigm something like:

    egwese        wigwese
    yugwese      yalgwese
    (h)igwese    degwese

For the second person plural, you might vary it depending on which current
English dialect you want it to come from; if it comes from a dialect like yours
and mine that uses "y'all", then you might want to think about expanding your
/l/-loss rule to word finally plus before velars, or maybe postvocalically, so

    *yalgwese --> ya(w)gwese

For the aorist, you could work out some system that turned the current simple
past into an aspect marker rather than tense + aspect as it is currently used;
phonologically, you might want to consider leveling out the phonetic alternation
between /t/ and /d/, choosing one or the other, maybe also reintroducing a schwa,
 getting rid of the consonat cluster thus:

    helped -->  hewpt -->  hewp@t    --> hewp@t
    jogged --> jogd --->    jog@d      --> jog@t*

* = analogical leveling

Still thinking 'bout the perfect...

> Also, I want to create cases from prepositions.  I'm considering:
>
> To -> dative
> In -> locative
> With -> instrumental
> and so on, the details aren't clear yet.
Yeah, it really depends on the kind of syntactic changes you posit.  Hey --
last year sometime we discussed this topic on this list, including things
like syntactic changes; why not check out the archives? I remember a
whole bunch of topicalization being used to move pronouns into the
right position...  (I'm not sure anymore that that holds water...)

> I want an accusative, but I don't know what could lead to it.  What
> would be reasonable?
You could reanalyze a current objective case pronoun as an accusative
marker down the line, perhaps.

===========================================
Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704
<http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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