Re: Tense on Nouns

Heya!

My language actually uses the morphosyntactic alignment of the noun's
cases to determine the tense of the verb. Here is a simple example:

Let us assume "S" is the subject of an intransitive sentence, "A" is
the agent of a transitive sentence, and "P" is the patient of a
transitive sentence. Let there be 3 cases, 1,2,3. This table follows:

PAST: S=3,A=1,P=3
PRESENT: S=1,A=2,P=3
FUTURE: S=2,A=2,P=1

For example, "I see him" in all three cases:

PAST I saw him: "toSee"    "I"+1    "He"+3
PRESENT I see him: "toSee"    "I"+2    "He"+3
FUTURE I will see him: "toSee"    "I"+2    "He"+1
and "I saw" would be: "toSee"    "I"+3

Although the system weakens when argument omission is allowed, I've
found it to be quite a nice way to compact morphemes together.

On 2/16/07, Brian B <caol.kailash@...> wrote:
> I was reading the discussion on Time Travel and Grammar and came up
> with an idea that I thought I'd share/bounce off everyone: What if the
> tense was attached to the noun instead of the verb? So that it'd look
> something like this:
>
> I-(present)-(agent) type-(action) email-(present)-(direct object).
>
> And potentially, I guess you could have different tenses for different
> nouns in the sentence.
>
> I-(present)-(agent) see-(action) him-(past)-(direct object).
>
> And maybe with the last example, also have a thing denoting on the
> noun the day it was seen, like him-(past)-(yesterday)-(direct object).
>
> I assume this has been done/is done somewhere and would like
> suggestions for further examples of implementation.
>
> Peace and Light,
> B
>
> --
> "Speak the truth. Practice virtue. Do not neglect to study every day. Do not
> neglect truth, virtue, studying or teaching.... Be one to whom your mother
> is a god...your teacher is a god, a guest is like a god.... Give with
> faith...give liberally, give with modesty...give with sympathy.... This is
> the command. This is the teaching. This is the secret of the Veda...."
> (Taittiriya Upanishad i.11.1-6)
>