George Boeree | tenses and verb markers

• Autor: George Boeree (“cgboeree”)
• Tema: tenses and verb markers
• Data: 2002-09-23 20:38
• Mesaje: 203 (presedente, seguente)

Kevin's thoughts about moving toward an isolating structure and clear
syntactic markers does have merit.  (Oh shit, I sound like a professor
again!)  A suggestion:

Treat ALL verbs as if they were active participles (which can then be
used as adjectives or, with noun markers, as nouns), then "introduce"
them with one of three verb markers.

es (present)
era (past)
sera (future)

... followed by the verb phrase.  These are, of course, the verb "to be"
(third person singular) in most of the romance languages, in the three
tenses.  This is isolating and logical, yet convenient and natural as
well!

Perhaps a similar idea would work for nouns.  Instead of many noun
markers, as in LFN, we could have only five:

la (def, sing)
li (def, plur)
un (indef, sing)
di (indef, plur)
lo (abstract)

... followed by the noun phrase.  (This and that would then be phrased
"la...asi, la...ala," etc.)

Es, era, and sera still keep their function as "to be," when followed by
a noun phrase, starting, of course, with la, etc.

Any thoughts on this idea?

George

--

C. George Boeree, PhD
cgboeree@...
www.ship.edu/~cgboeree

"I like reality.  It tastes of bread." -- Jean Anouilh

"Cloquet hated reality but realized it was still the only place to get a
good steak." -- Woody Allen