Verbs and aspect

The most daunting task in learning languages like German, Spanish or French has to be learning all the forms of the verb and how they are used. English may have fewer distinct forms, but as in German you have numerous irregular (strong) verbs to contend with. In Norwegian even some regular (weak) verbs have vowel changes in the stem to worry about. I think most English speakers who dream about creating their own language think about simplfying the verbal system. There are serval ways to do that.

I think the most productive way is to make verbal aspect a central feature. Sadly unless you are already familiar with a language that has it , you would have difficultly finding a complete simple explanation of how it works, and it is a simple concept.

For those of you who don't know what verbal aspect as a central feature means I would like to simply to direct you to the Wikipedia article on grammatical aspect. However at this moment (December 2010) that article is mostly taken up with trying to relate verbal aspect to languages in which it isn't terribly important! Worse the discussion about aspect in Slavic languages, in which they are important, is grossly overblown and most likely to confuse, unless you already understand the concept.

In Slavic languages like Russian and Polish, there are two basic verb forms, the perfective and the imperfective. Each has an infinitive plus a past and a non-past conjugation, and that's it. No subjunctives, no progressive tenses, no pluperfect or any of that. The perfective form refers to the finish of an act or a state; the imperfective refers to everything else. In Slavic, the perfective is restricted to single acts or states. Most frequently the perfective form is the same as the imperfective with the addition of a prefix. Using other prefixes with the imperfective verb expands the vocabulary with new perfective verbs with new meanings which can then be made into corresponding new imperfective verbs in fairly consistent ways.

The perfective verb only has only present and future tense, it replaces verb forms like:
I did, I have done, I had done, I will do, I will have done.

The imperfective verb in Russian has only past and present tense, and is used in the future in the infinite with a helping verb. The imperfective verb replaces verb forms like:
I was doing, I have been doing, I had been doing, I am doing, I do, I will be doing, I will have been doing.

It's really almost just that simple. But if you haven't had to use it actively in a natural language, you are probably not going to feel comfortable with it or use it correctly.

It should be no surprise when I say, the more natural languages you know before you start to create your own, the more choices you will have in verbs and everything else.