Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Keeping the Greek Aorist

So I've been thinking about the verb situation a bit and got some advice from the conlang list too. As I mentioned before, the goal of Vulgare is to simplify Latin grammar to make it accessible, while maintaining enough complexity such that users may be able to "get by" if they were to read an actual Latin text. The same consideration exists for Greek vocabulary.

Vulgare thus maintains verb number and person, concepts inherent to Latin and Greek. I also kept a distinction between the imperfect and the perfect so that users will know the difference various Latin verb forms. Now, Greek verbs have a third root that I'd also like to maintain - the aorist, which is technically neither imperfect or perfect. Even modern Greek maintains the aorist root form, so I feel it's a concept that users should be familiar with. But how can it be incorporated into the language with Latin-based verbs that don't have an aorist? I don't really feel like creating a new aorist form for those verbs, so maybe users would just have to learn that some verbs have aorist forms and some verbs don't, which I don't believe would be a problem because the aorist form would probably not be used so much overall. Here's what I'm currently thinking:

For the (Latin-derived) verb amare - to love
Imperfect: amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant
Perfect: amavi, amavis, amavit, amavimus, amavitis, amavent
No Aorist
Imperative: ama
Active Participle: amante
Passive Participle: amata/o
Full principle parts (amo, amare, amavi, amata)

For the (Greek-derived) verb philere - to love
Imperfect: philo, philes, philet, philemus, philetis, philent
Perfect: pephileci, pephilecis, pephilecit, pephilecimus, pephilecitis, pephilecent
Aorist: philesa (or ephilesa), philesas, philesat, philesamus, philesatis, philesant
Imperative: phile (which will be homographic with the word for friend)
Active Participle: philente
Passive Participle: philomena/o
Full principle parts (philo, philere, pephileci/philesa, philomena)

So users would be just required to learn the principle parts of any verb with the addition of the aorist form if it's a Greek-derived verb. I'm not sure if the aorist form should have the initial e- attached to it. I was thinking of possibly having that initial e- as a generalized tense marker to indicate past tense (and I seem to remember that Peano suggested the same idea in his Latino Sine Flexione).

No it's all fine and good to have specified aspects (imperfect, perfect, and aorist), but there are more tenses than that (the future, for instance). I'll deal with that in my next post.

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