Conlang Year: Week 14
Week 14 is here. It's time to dive further into verbs! As always, prompts can be found here.
Day 92 - Explore options for verb classes
Oof, dealing with noun classes is already a lot. I don't think I want to add class on top of tense for verbs - it's one more thing for me to remember. That decided, I'll add a few more verbs here.
tas - to be, to exist
pʃʌ - to make, to do
us.ʃwɪ - to possess, to have
nɪsq - to know, to understand
Day 93 - Decide if you want index markers co-occurring with verbs
I've thought about this for a while and I think it does make sense to have these index markers, probably at least carrying information about class and perhaps also the person. I'll see how it looks when we get to creating the markers. These are going to exist as prefixes on the verbs.
Day 94 - Brainstorm options for tense/aspect
My immediate impulse is to go with past, present, and future tense because that's more familiar to me. English carries information about aspect as well, but it's less often part of the verb itself, being carried along with words like "will," "would," or "have." Reading up about grammatical aspect, I am reminded of how complicated this all is in English despite the fact that I do it all instinctually.
After some consideration, I'm going to stick with my impulse and start off with past, present, and future tense.
Day 95 - Consider options for marking non-finite verb forms
I think a good marker for the infinitive form of a verb would be the adposition "ʃa," which means for or supporting.
The unmarked form of a verb will be the past tense.
Day 96 - Organize your notes on verb inflections
I've updated my documentation to list the decisions I've made over the past few days.
Day 97 - Create verbs to work with in the coming days
Here's a few more verbs I added -
aɪb.as - to desire, to want
boŋ - to use
ɛɪ.ʌŋʃ - to regard, to look at, to see
Day 98 - Create any index markers you want for your verbs
With the decisions I've made so far, we're going to need markers that indicate agreement with the class of the subject, indicators as to whether the speaker, the target of their speech, or a third party is taking the action, and markers for the present and future tense. I peeked ahead and it looks like the tense markers will be taken care of on Day 99, so I'll stick to class and person markers today.
Animate subject - -yx
Inanimate subject - -aʎ
First-person - ɛɪ-
Second-person - ta-
Third-person - ʒɛ-
I got the animate subject marker from breaking down the other half of the word for person, xɪɾ. The inanimate subject marker is completely made up; I didn't have a good lexical source to draw from for that one. The person markings are simply reduced forms of the respective pronouns.
When we combine these, we end up with something like this -
First-person (this is always animate, inanimate subjects can't speak) - ɛɪx
Second-person animate - tax
Second-person inanimate - taʎ
Third-person animate - ʒɛx
Third-person inanimate - ʒɛʎ
When I combined these with a few of the phrases I worked on last week, this is what I end up with -
3.a.FIGHT dog.nom cat.acc - ʒɛx.aɸ.ʎaɢ ʃxu.ɾa βðøm.ɾaŋ "The dog fought the cat."
3.a.PLANT spouse.nom fruit tree.acc child.dat - ʒɛx.an.ɪ ɣʒɪŋ.ɾa θaɪ.ɢaŋ dwʌɢ.ɾaɪm "The spouse planted the tree for the child."
3.i.FLOOD stream.nom field.acc clan.gen - ʒɛʎ.ɪx.qyʒ βyð.ɾa ŋaɪ.ɢaŋ ɾɪm.ʃθoŋ.ɾat "The stream flooded the clan's field."
1.WALK I.nom with elephant.dat - ɛɪx.βɛɪ ɛɪ sɪn ɸθɾaŋ.ɾaɪm "I walked with the elephant."
2.a.LISTEN lizard.nom for cat.dat - tax.xɛɪt.zɛɪ ŋaʎ ɾɪm βðøm.ɾaɪm "You listened for the cat."
One of the things writing this down has made me realize is that using these as prefixes makes it sound a bit strange with the rule that Thekkish always emphasizes the first syllable of a word. I think I'm going to make an addendum to that rule - prefixes don't count, they are not the stressed syllable.