Re: Pronouns Marked for Tense/Aspect/Mood

Well, Teonaht does something like this.   I call it the "law of
detachability," but the norm, now, in Teonaht is to take the original tense
and aspect suffix and prefix it to the pronoun.  It's not synthetic by any
means, it's purely clitic, but try:

    elry  "preterite I" (I was)
    omry  "habituative I" (I usually)
    olmry "habituative preterite I" (I usually was)
    esry "futuric I" (I will be)
    uary "completive I" (I have been) etc.

With a zero copula, the pronouns do carry the weight of the information
about tense and aspect.

With verbs:  Le nosoyt cel brihttilin elai uafel, "the heron through the
mist preterite-it fly."

Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
Eskkoat ol ai sendran, rohsan nuehra celyil takrem bomai nakuo.
"My shadow follows me, putting strange, new roses into the world."



----- Original Message -----
From: "Arthaey Angosii" <arthaey@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2003 1:44 AM
Subject: Pronouns Marked for Tense/Aspect/Mood


> >LINGUIST List:  Vol-14-1205. Tue Apr 29 2003. ISSN: 1068-4875.
> >Subject: 14.1205, Sum: Tense Marking on Pronouns
> >
> >Date:  28 Apr 2003 15:47:11 -0000
> >From:  David Palfreyman <f7385@...>
> >Subject:  Tense Marking on Pronouns
> >
> > [snippage]
> >b) Are there other languages which mark tense on pronouns?
>
> The examples Palfreyman give all seem to involve the pronouns marked for
> the tense _of_the_verb_.  That's certainly interesting in and of itself,
> but I'm more interested in finding out if any other natlang or conlangs
act
> like Asha'ille in marking tenses of the pronoun itself.  (I am expecting
> some anadewisms, of course. :)
>
> It seems like the natlang samples are kind of like pronoun-verb
> tense/aspect/mood agreement, rather than the pronoun carrying a
> tense/aspect/mood of its own, separate from the verb. Then again, I could
> be misunderstanding exactly what tense/aspect/mood mean (as seems to be a
> common confusion, judging by the other thread currently going around)...
>
> Palfreyman later wrote:
>
> >*Non-propositional* (or nominal scope) tense marking should be
> >distinguished from the examples above.  Louisa Sadler:
> >
> >The core case of [non-propositional marking is] where a TAM marker on
> >a nominal temporally locates the nominal itself independently of any
> >clausal TAM specification, as e.g. in
> >
> >       I see-future the house-past
> >       = I will see that which used to be the house
> >
> >Louisa and Rachel did not recall any similar examples for pronouns,
> >and some respondents expressed doubt that such purely pronominal
> >marking of tense would be meaningful, for example Rachel: It's hard to
> >imagine what they could mean... 'formerly me', 'formerly him/her'?).
> >Plausible examples of tense on nouns and adjectives seemed to be
> >easier to find
>
> Them non-conlangers can be so unimaginative!  :)  For an example from
> Asha'ille of exactly the notion of "formerly me":
>
> Regular, declarative sentences (realis mood?):
>     Pas shav en'i.       "I spoke."
>     Pas shav pen'o.      "Past-I spoke."
>
> Optative mood:
>     Teir pas shav en'i.  "It would be good that I spoke."
>     Teir pas shav pen'o. "It would be good that past-I spoke."
>
> In the above sentences, |en'i| is the normal pronoun referring to the self
> (generally equivalent to the first-person pronoun).  |pen'o| is also a
> pronoun referring to the self and doesn't correspond to a single term in
> English.  Instead, Cresaeans believe that a person's fundamental identity
> changes over time.  After enough time, a person is so different from who
> they used to be that he can't properly be referred to as the same person
> anymore -- thus, a new pronoun is required.
>
> So, for the first sentence |pas shav en'i|, I myself as I currently am did
> the speaking.  In |pas shav pen'o|, however, it was the person I was back
> then that said those things.  (Politicians probably which English had such
> a system built into it, eh?  <grin> )
>
> The third and fourth sentences illustrate that the pronoun-marking is
> independent of the verb's mood.  The word |teir| marks a sentence as in
the
> optative mood (as according to SIL's linguistic glossary) and can apply
> equally to |en'i| or |pen'o|.
>
> As one final note, the sentences involving |pen'o| don't _have_ to be in
> the past tense, although those are the more natural ones to understand.
> |Shav pen'o| could mean something like "I speak, where I have relapsed
back
> into the person I used to be."  :)
>
>
> --
> AA
>