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.

Madha Phonology and Orthography

Before I leave the topic of phonology, which after all may be as far as is necessary for most people wanting a snippet of odd sounding language for their writing, I should share some of my own language.

The name of the language is Madha, which simply means 'speech.' It had a different, more grandiose name back when I was a teenager. But in time the original name began to sound more and more ridiculous. The roots which I joined together in the original name still are in the language as separate roots and are unchanged. They are the oldest pieces of the language as it exists now, over 40 years old.

The literary context behind Madha is a group of humanlike aliens called dars. They are discovered, on their own planet, before humans are discovered by a community of more advanced aliens who look nothing like us. The dars are thrust into the Void before they are ready as a culture, which results in them copying what their discoverers are doing. A couple hundred years later humans are discovered making their first clumsy steps into deep space. My first novel was set several hundred years after that when humans have become the darlings of the advanced aliens in terms of running the combined Fleet. While the dars have been somewhat been pushed to the background in Void, politically and morally they are much more respected than humans. The ship in my novel is a microcosm of the changes in both human and darrish society necessary to bring all of these allies through a long, painful war against an outside society with entirely different ideas about how the Void should be ruled.

Despite the fact that some pieces of the language have survived intact, much has changed over the years. Several times I changed the quality of the vowels, because as my study of linguistics and real languages got deeper, the sounds I liked hearing in Madha changed.

The vowels of Madha are: a å e i æ x o u
a as in father
å as ai in pain (I use a' or sometimes ai in English fonts)
e as in met
i as in machine
æ as i in tie (i' in English fonts)
x as u in nut
o as in open
u as oo in moon, not as the word you

The paired voiced and unvoiced consants of Madha are:
b,p,j,c (always pronounced like English ch),d,t,v,f,g,k,z,s,ź,ś,ð,þ,w,q
The unpaired consonants are h,l,m,n,r,y
r is a flap as r in Spanish or Russian, never like r in French or German.
ź or zh is as z in azure
ś or sh is as sh in should
ð or dh is as th in the or there
þ or th is as th in thin or thistle
q is as kf in book fair

The alterneratives make it easier to use English fonts. The letter 'w' represents a variable sound, explained as different dialects. It was originally intended to be pronounced 'gw' compared to q's 'kf' because I did not like the way English w sounded with some of the older vowels sets I was using. Now English w is working fine, but I still have the urge to pronounce it some other way. It's a true historical change in the making in phonology!