Re: Pronouns Marked for Tense/Aspect/Mood

On Wednesday 30 April 2003 10:22 am, Roger Mills wrote:
> Arthaey Angosii wrote:
> > 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.
>
> I'd have to check this in the old grammar, which I don't have access to
> nowadays, but IIRC the Indonesian language Mori (spoken in eastern
> Celebes/Sulawesi) has something like this:
>
> 1.  One series of pronouns, clear reflexes of cognate items in other
> languages, used to indicate past/present or "realis";
> 2. A second series based on the above, but with prefixes and suffixes, used
> to indicate future/conditional or "irrealis".
> What I'm not sure of is whether the verb form also has a different prefix
> in each case.....Nor what what happens in the case of a noun subject...
        Incredible! The Natlang Law strikes again! Enamyn (which besides marking both
nouns and pronouns for tense) has both realis and irrealis forms, although
the irrealis is restricted to the conditional or subjunctive; there is both a
future realis form and future irrealis form.

>> ....... 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.
        This was how I originally imagined the Enamyn worldview. However, as I have
explored Enamyn's noun tense, it became clear that such is not the case; they
viewed the human being as a continuous person throughout time, not a chain of
persons. Enamyn's noun tense simply shows tense and topicality, that's all.
        :Peter
--
Oh what a tangled web they weave who try a new word to conceive!

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