I’m apparently gathering vague ideas for one or multiple future conlangs here. Maybe it’ll all make sense in the end…
So, reading up on Latejami (thanks to @zearen’s post about it), I liked the derivational system for different verb forms.
In short, a basic concept like e.g. knowledge, is “conjugated” (for lack of a better word) for:
- how it applies to one or more entities, which may occur as agents, patients, or “focus” (which is to say some oblique, non-agentive/-patientive relation).
- whether it is stative (maintaining a steady state) or dynamic (changing state)
Examples:
- know, patient (plus oblique), stative: “patient X experiences a steady state of knowledge (about oblique Y)”
- know, patient (plus oblique), dynamic: “patient X learns (oblique Y)”
- know, agent plus patient (plus oblique), stative “agent X maintains patient Y’s knowledge (of oblique Z)”
- …
Now Latejami diffetentiates these conjugations by suffixing different morphemes to (and choosing a default unmarked version of) verbs.
But what if we had (please tell me a better term for this) pseudo-verbs, that begin a sentence and only carry the information about which types of entities we want to describe, leaving the actual verbs unchanged?
Then, using <XYZ> to refer to one word, the languages structure could be like:
<Agent, Patient, dynamic> <Alice> <Bob> <know>
- “Alice teaches Bob.”
One positive aspect is that we get sentence fences for free, because a sentence always starts with the pseudo-verb, and ends with the actual verb.