Re: Verb Structure

Hi!

veritosproject@GMAIL.COM writes:
> Couldn't you get a language with only one verb without much effort,
> and still have full meaning?
>
> Example:
>
> Yesterday I posted a message on the CONLANG list.
> Yesterday I was (the only verb) in-a-state-of-posting a message on the
> conlang list.
>
> And so on.
As some people have stated already, this is surely possible.

Going to the extreme, several conlangs even drop the now redundant
verb and thus have no verb at all.  My first conlang Fukhian is an
example (I only found this out after a reanalysis after years of the
conlang's existence) which is agglutinative.  Since there's no verb,
the verbal suffixes are cliticised to the first word of the clause, no
matter what type of word.  Fukhian has free word order, so this is
fun. :-)

With isolating langs, you have less funny effects, since the verbal
categories will probably be expressed with particles that don't need a
carrying word, so dropping a redundant verb is no problem at all.

My own esthetical feelings would probably make me drop verbs totally
if a conlang sketch had only one verb, but for a sketch with two or
three verbs, I'd probably keep the system that way.

**Henrik