Verbs 2

So whether or not you are up to aspect as a main feaure, you do need to come up with some kind of comprehensive verbal system. The more you try to leave out now the more problems you'll have down the road.

Some things can be done away with or expanded upon. If you are willing to use nouns and pronouns as often as you would in English, you don't need to conjugate your verbs, even as little as we do in English. If you'd like to be able to avoid stating 'I', 'we' and 'you' in every last sentence with those concepts as subjects, you can conjugate verbs for case and number, You can even conjugate verbs for gender like Russian and other Slavic languages do in the past tense.

Personally I prefer simple verbs. I originally tried to get by with exactly one form of the verb for everything including the inifinite. I had one ending, -u, that marked that the word was a verb, and invariable particles elsewhere gave the tense and mood of the verb phrase. It seemed to work fine, but as time passed I wanted to get more out of the verbs. I did away with the tense particles and conjugated the verb for tense using the -u ending as the base for perfective and went with -i as the base for imperfective. That allowed me to get rid of the rest of the helping verbs masquerading as particles. I was much happier with the result. You might well decide the opposite is what you'd want.

Years later it occured to me that I didn't need to follow any verbal system I knew from natural languages. As an experiment I tried making verbs of state of being like 'is', 'see' and 'hear' as a different class of verb entirely separate from physical action, and mental action verbs like 'make', 'look' and 'listen'. It was very successful. By giving a different set of endings to my new *stative verbs* I was able to reduce the number of word roots I was using. 'Look and see' and several other pairs needed only one root. The power of what I had became clear when I was translating the phrase "the road wound around the mountain." I suddenly realized that by using a stative verb form of 'wind' in this sentence, I didn't need to struggle with the awkward and perhaps comical possibility someone would think of the road actively winding. And on the other hand, if I wanted to go for the metaphor of the road squeezing the mountain, if I used an active verb, it was there as bold as brass. Stative verbs quickly became something I'd definitely put in any new language I'd dream up.

The stative verbs led to yet another kind of verb, which I call 'cumulative.' These are verbs which show a change in state, 'growing', 'shrinking', 'becoming', 'turning blue', and so on. They aren't as common or necessarily as powerful as the stative verbs. But they do add color and individuality to the language.

To all these types of verbs, I've added passive or passive-like forms by changing the characteristic vowels to diphthongs. All the forms of verbs are instantly recognizable. There are few enough forms, and the forms are similar enough that memorizing the endings is a breeze.

Not everything I tried was so successful. More on that next time.