Re: Thylean, continued

On Mon, 13 Nov 2000 11:42:06 +0100, Christophe Grandsire
<christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:

Ah, Cristophe, mon ami. Good to have you back! :)

>
>Nice and logical. I've been really boring by keeping in "Roumant" the
normal
>Western Romance tongues future: infinitive + "to have" endings. But I like
it
>this way :) .
Boring or perhaps realistic? Thylean is in many ways a flight of fantasy,
while I perceive Roumant as more realistic (especially its horrible
spelling, in keeping tradition with French orthographic practices). I'm
always trying to find the perfect balance between realism and originality.

>Nice idea :) . I also find the use of 'ducere' as an auxiliary for
continuous
>aspect really neat. In my Reman, the story is a little different: "esse"
was
>slowly restricted only to the use as continuous aspect auxiliary (with the
>infinitive) which has now the form 'esi'. It seems that everything comes
from
>the appearance of nominal sentences in the language, yielding to less and
less
>use of "esse" as a copula.
"Reman", hehe. How many Romancelangs have you made? And, heh, do they all
have names derived from "Rom"? But "esse" as a continuous marker is quite
realistic. I thought of doing that, you see, because Icelandic does exactly
that. The continuous aspect with "vera" (to be) + inf in my language has
expanded enormously and is now quite popular for all kinds of uses. I wanted
to do the same, only I though using 'esse' wasn't quite "striking" enough,
which is why I chose 'ducere' (a rather unconventional auxiliary, though I'd
think perceivable).

>Just like I do in Reman and "Roumant" :)) . It seems that the subjunctive
future
>is very popular (by the way, Reman has a really strange tense system,
completely
>different from other Romance languages, but not quite different from
Thylean. In
>Reman, Indicative and Subjunctive have both three and only three tenses:
>present, past and future. No imperfect, no pluperfect and others, no
conditional
>mood, and the subjunctive future seems to come from the latin future
participle.

Cool. Moving more towards the Germanic verb system (which I like much more
than the Romance verbs). I enjoyed killing the imperfect tense in Thylean ;)

>Also, tenses in subclauses are relative to the tense of reference of the
>principal clause (instead of absolute like in other Romance languages),
which
>explains the disappearance of tenses like the pluperfect, future perfect
and
>others...).
I'm not very strong in syntax...phonology is my specialty. But oh yes, now I
get it. So the subjunctive would take on the same tense as the principal
clause's verb.

>Nicely done, to keep the value of the old Latin pluperfect, instead of
putting
>it to replace the perfect like in French. Thylean is definitely very
>conservative, despite all its creations :) .
I'm happy with the active voice so far, as I think I've managed to preserve
the CL system in a more stable form (such as how the future tense has been
reanalyzed).

>So if the passive has become middle voice, how do you mark passive? Or did
you
>discard completely the passive voice in Thylean?
Well, good point. It's kind of a crisis. Perhaps I'll draw back and make it
passive/middle as it was. Ok, the idea was that the old passive would become
middle and the passive would be exclusive composed of 'esse' + participle.
The problem is, then I'd have to invent whole new conjugations of perfect
and pluperfect middle voice, which would be, to say the least, extraordinary
feats of analogy. In short, not realistic. The easiest solution seems to
keep it the way it was in CL. Any suggestions?

If you've read my last post, on later developments in Thyle, you'll know
that there are lots of langs I'm planning in the same world. Perhaps I'll
only just finish the sketch of Thylean 500 AD well enough to get some texts
written, which will then speak for themselves. Then I would just move on to
the next stages of Thylean, or perhaps briefly describe Thylean dialects and
Insular Thylean. But let's not get ahead of ourselves...:)

Óskar