From: Christophe Grandsire (christophe.grandsire@free.fr)
Date: Mon Mar 26 2001 - 22:12:34 EST
En réponse à Eric Christopherson <rakko@charter.net>:
> > Do the conjugations look like the words they'd make would be
> impossibly
> > long?
>
> Nope. Looks really cool :)
>
Indeed :) .
> I'm wondering though if it'd make sense to have suffixed pronouns the
> way
> some Semitic languages do (I'm not sure if ancient Hebrew had those or
> not).
> Maybe just in certain "tenses":
>
> Regular Latin-derived present tense:
> ammo^
> amma^
> amm
> amma^mu^
> amma^ti^
> amman
> Hybridized Latin-derived, Hebrew-inspired past tense:
> amma^veg
> amma^vtu^
> amma^vhac/amma^vha^jic
> amma^vno^s
> amma^vjo^s
> amma^vhi^de^/amma^vhajde^
>
> Well, just an idea.
>
I have some kind of idea for my Arabo-Romance conlang which looks like yours. In
Arabic, the past tense is conjugated entirely through prefixes, while the
present is conjugated more through prefixes (and suffixes only to mark the
gender of the subject) (I'm entirely forgetting about the vowel scheme, but
that's not relevant for my conlang). My idea, which is nicely backed up by the
way French handles conjugation (mostly through prefixing of personal enclitics
for subject (mandatory) and objects (optional)) is to find an evolution of my
Arabo-Romance lang that leads to the same kind of conjugation as in Arabic:
through prefixes in the present (which looks like French) and through suffixes
in the past tense (in French too, most of the endings of the past simple are
still different, even in speech). I also want to imitate Arabic by having
enclitic object suffixes (French handles it as prefixes).
As for the way I can obtain that, besides sound changes that will make the
endings of the present more or less identical, I'm thinking of the effect of
trying to conciliate Latin word order (SOV) with Arabic word order (VSO). This
would lead to a transient soVSO order (with small s and o referring to the
subject and object personal pronouns), simplified to sVSO (since the object
agreement wouldn't be seen as necessary, while the subject agreement would seem
necessary to keep) or sVoS if the object is a pronoun (natural tendency to put a
personal pronoun as near to the verb as possible) and finally VSO because s (the
subject pronoun) would have fused with V (but more than in French). As for the
past tense, since the personal endings of the verb would have been kept better,
the evolution would have led more directly to VSO, without the stage sVSO, and
thus the conjugation would still be based on suffixes.
What do you think of all this? Was I clear enough? Is this likely at all?
Christophe.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
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