Re: latin verb examples and tense meanings

At 20:30 17/01/00 +0100, you wrote:
>>
>>Past: (active from active-perfect, passive from passive-imperfect)
>>active:  macta:i: | macta:si: | macta:u | macta:mu: | macta:si |
>>macta:run
>>passive:  macta:ba | macta:ba:ri | macta:ba:tu | macta:ba:mu |
>>macta:ba:mi:n | macta:bant
>
>There is, of course, no precedent for conflated the two tenses in the
>Romance langs.
        Yes there is: Reman :) . It happens that in my Romance conlang, each tense
has been split into perfect and imperfect (with analytic forms for the
imperfect) so the latin imperfect disappeared. The past has thus survived,
and the passive past has been formed by fusion of an analytic form using
the passive participle and an auxiliary (much like the future in most
Romance langs with the infinitive). But Reman is a very special Romance
conlang which generally doesn't follow any pattern of the Western Romance
languages (that was my goal, I wanted a Romance language as different with
the other Romance languages as English is with the Germanic languages).

  The imperfect has maintained itself as a separate tense.
>It is very like the Slav imperfective past in meaning and contrasts with
>the past definite (where it survives) or a perfect tense which corresponds
>to the perfective past in the Slav langs.  That is, the difference between
>the two tenses is very much one of aspect and, since I understood that
>aspect is fundamental to the verb system in the Semitic langs, I'm a bit
>surprised at this development in Jûdajca.  (Hope the u-cirmcumflex come out
>OK)
>
        It did with me :) .

>
>Not so - the -b- forms are used for -E:RE verbs also.  In early Latin they
>were also found with -IRE verbs; and such forms still occasionally appeared
>in verse in the Classical period.
>
        If I remember correctly, the Latin future came from the subjunctive of PIE
which was marked by a suffix -bh- before the personal ending. So it's no
surprise that the future in -b- was the first one in Early Latin and that
the other futures are recent developments. I wonder where they came from.

>In France -E:RE --> -OIR while -ERE --> -RE.  Thus, one can see the drift
>was entirely in the opposite direction there.  The -OIR verbs are very much
>a minority in modern French.
        Yes, but a ruling minority! They are some of the most used verbs in French
(the equivalents of the English modals are all -OIR verbs).

                                                        Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

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