Ahzoh wrote: ↑03 Jun 2021 06:15
My conlang has three basic verbal distinctions: the reallis, the subjunctive, and the imperative/jussive. I intend to create a tense distinction by adding a "future" prefix, so that there now becomes a basic verbal distinction of nonfuture and future. Would it then make sense for the imperative/jussive mood to turn into a subjunctive mood? I think when it stands alone it will still have imperative force, and optative force in the future, but when used with other verbs it will have a subjunctive force.
Why would it turn into a subjunctive when you already have a subjunctive?
So far as I'm aware, it's much more common for a subjunctive to become an optative/jussive/etc than vice versa, for obvious reasons: people will say "I'd have a drink" to mean "I want to have a drink", or even "I should have a drink", but people would rarely say, say, "Whether I ought to have a drink or not, I'd like a meal" to mean "Whether I'm having a drink or not..." - because fundamentally jussives and the like have more content than a bare subjunctive, and it's more common to add content than to lose it. But having said that, the reverse is certainly plausible, if less probable.
Additionally, I'm thinking of having a noun pattern to express a "modal agent" as it ultimately derives from verb froms:
paruḫtessu / paruḫtāsu "she who speaks"
parḫattessu / parḫattāsu "she who must speak"
paruḫtāsu (conjugated verb) > parāḫ-um (agent)
parḫattāsu (conjugated verb) > parḫās-um (imperative agent?)
(Not sure if these are plausible sound changes either)
I'm not sure how a mood-based agent deverbal would work.
You've just told us! For instance, "she who speaks", vs "she who must speak". Vs "she who I want to speak", "she who ought to speak", "she who might speak", etc.
There's a hint of this even in English: -ee and -ed and -ate/-ete usually mark indicative patients, while -end/-and/-endum/-andum in theory marks subjunctive patients: a conjugate has been conjoined, whereas a conjugand is to be conjoined, and so on. In English, this doesn't work well, because all these suffixes are less than fully productive, and the gerundives tend to lose their modal meaning once the word is widely adopted (dividends and addenda have usually in practice already been divided/added). But there's no reason the distinction couldn't be systematic: a 'divorcee' could be a divorced person, for instance, while a 'divorcend' could be someone who ought to be divorced, or who someone has decided to divorce.
Latin made this distinction, at least in adjectives, which could often be used substantively: "deletus", something destroyed, vs "delendus", something to be destroyed. Carthago delenda est!
Like I could get how it could work with tense, with your former-wives and husband-to-be's
Plausibly I could only see: ṣâb-um "killer" versus ṣābās-um "one who must be killed" > "public enemy number-one, bounty target" or "suspected killer"
Yes, that's a gerundive - although of course you don't need the de-productivising final derivation there. It could just mean 'one who must be killed' - an important legal concept. "The one who must be killed is to be given a last meal"; "you are one who must be killed!", etc. In the same way that "killer" just means "one who kills", and doesn't have to have semantic drift to "executioner" or "poultry farmer" or whatever.
However, be careful: the distinction you make is not primarily one of mood, but one of voice! Killer is an agent, one who must be killed is a patient. But of course you could have a modal agent: one who must kill. [for instance: "When a criminal of noble blood is to be killed, he-who-must-kill must be of equivalent rank to he-whom-must-be-killed"].
Bear in mind that one reason modal agents might not seem useful in English is that our agents are ambiguous - either indicative OR subjunctive. "Killer" can be a person who has killed or does kill, OR a person who is to kill or ought to kill, or colloquially someone who is able to kill. ["wow, that guy's really agressive!" - "yeah, he's a real killer!"... doesn't necessarily mean he HAS or even WILL kill someone, just that it seems they COULD]. But you could systematically distinguish.
So for instance, going back to patients for a moment: we can say "the killer's last victim was found in a field". "victim" here is the patient of a past indicative act. "We decoded the message - you are the next victim!" - 'victim' here is indicative future. But "the killer is on the hunt for a new victim" - 'victim' is both future and non-indicative.
In fact, you can even create an ambiguity in this way. "The killer is looking for their next victim" can have either an indicative patient (the killer has decided their next victim will be Fred, but cannot find Fred, so is looking for them), or a non-indicative patient (the killer is trying to find someone (as yet unknown to them) who should, could, might, would, be their next victim).
Similarly: "the ideal applicant has ten years of experience" - do you mean the indicative ideal applicant (an actual applicant who happens to be ideal), or the optative ideal applicant (an ideal person you wish would apply)?
There's no reason a language can't systematically mark these modes: "she who has applied" vs "she who ought to have applied"; "he who will be victimised" vs "he who would be victimised (if they happened to be the first person the killer saw)", and so on.