Hypothetical conlang with strange tense system

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Quetzalcoatl
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Hypothetical conlang with strange tense system

Post by Quetzalcoatl »

Original story in English:

There is a story they tell of two dogs. Both dogs, at separate times, walk into the same room. One dog comes out wagging his tail while the other comes out growling.
A woman watching this goes into the room to see what could possibly ma...ke one dog so happy and the other dog so mad. To her surprise she finds a room full of mirrors. The happy dog found a thousand happy dogs looking back at him. The angry dog saw only angry growling dogs looking back at him. Meaning: What you see in the world around you is a reflection of who you are.

Hypothetical conlang:

There is a story-X they tell of two dogs. Both dogs, at separate times, walk-M1 into the same room. One dog comes out-M2 wagging his tail while the other comes out-M2 growling.
A woman watching this goes-M2 into the room to see what could possibly make-M2-ANT one dog so happy and the other dog so mad. To her surprise she finds-M2 a room full of mirrors. The happy dog found-M2-ANT a thousand happy dogs looking back at him. The angry dog saw-M2-ANT only angry growling dogs looking back at him. What-Y you see in the world around you is a reflection of who you are.


Can you guess what the suffixes "X", "Y" "M1", "M2" and "ANT" mean?! :)
Salmoneus
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Re: Hypothetical conlang with strange tense system

Post by Salmoneus »

M1 and ANT indicate backgrounding. The difference is that ANT has a retrospective, perfect or anterior sense. M2 indicates foregrounding. I don't really understand why you'd pair ANT with M2 instead of M1 - that seems a bit Englishy to me - but anything's possible I guess.

X and Y could be anything, there's no way to know. Given the title of the thread, presumably they're nominal tenses that randomly only apply to a tiny percentage of nouns, but who knows.
Quetzalcoatl
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Re: Hypothetical conlang with strange tense system

Post by Quetzalcoatl »

Actually no, the basic idea has nothing to do with backgrounding and foregrounding. It's about deixis. One day I suddenly had the thought... Why is it even necessary to mark all verbs in a text for tense like in most Indo-European languages? If I start telling a story, then it should be enough to indicate only once when the action happened, i.e. if I tell a story that happened completely in the past, I should not need to use a past tense marker in each sentence. Instead, it should be enough to just use a tense marker in the first sentence of my narration.

Therefore X and Y are like buttons. X "turns on" the narration mode, Y turns it off. As soon as X is used, the listener knows that we are not talking about our daily lives or something that is going on right now, but starting a narration. It could be something that happened in the past or that will happen in the future, it could be a story from a book or a movie or something which exists just in our imagination. Y, on the other hand, would switch off the naration mode. Unmarked verbs would automatically be in the "present tense", i.e. listeners would assume by default that the things we are talking about are taking place in the present or that we are talking about facts that are always true at any time (like "Paris is the capital of France").

M1 and M2, however, have another function. They kind of work like "tense articles". M1 is indefinite, M2 is definite. When you start the narration mode by using the affix "X", the first verb is always M1. M1 means something like "the start of a narration" (it's like opening up a new category, just like an indefinite article, but for tense), whereas "M2" simply means that I am still talking about the same time (like a definite article).

X = start of a narration about something fictional, something imaginary, something that happened in the past or something that will happen in the future
Y = termination of narration mode

X and Y can be attached to a noun, pronoun or a whole phrase.

M1 and M2 can only be attached to verbs.

M1 = start of a narration
M2 = continuation of a narration
Quetzalcoatl
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Re: Hypothetical conlang with strange tense system

Post by Quetzalcoatl »

Something that just occured to me: Maybe, X and Y are not tenses, but rather moods.
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eldin raigmore
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Re: Hypothetical conlang with strange tense system

Post by eldin raigmore »

Quetzalcoatl wrote: 21 Mar 2023 23:21 Something that just occured to me: Maybe, X and Y are not tenses, but rather moods.
That seems to me to be one good way of looking at it; it might be the best way.

Another way that has occurred to me, is using relative tense (such as anterior, posterior, and simultaneous) together with or instead of absolute tense (such as past, future, and present). The X and Y particles (or morphemes? or clitics?) might tell whether and when the speaker was switching from tense to anteriority/vorzeitigkeit and/or back.
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Pāṇini
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Re: Hypothetical conlang with strange tense system

Post by Pāṇini »

ANADEW strikes again! Biblical Hebrew does something very similar:

Most passages of Biblical narrative begin with the helping verb wayəhi followed by a verb in the infinitive. Wayəhi is an inflected form of the copula translated as “and it came to pass” in the KJV. It correlates to Quetzalcoatl’s “X”, as the verb in the infinitive does to “M1”. “M2” corresponds to the BH wayyiqṭol form, which synchronically appears to be an imperfective preceded by the conjunction -, “and”, and by definition begins a VSO sentence. The initial wayəhi is also in the wayyiqṭol form, though it behaves differently from the verbs within the passage. If I’m not mistaken, background information (Q’s “ANT”) would typically be marked by using the standard perfective in an SVO word order. There is no special marker for the end of a narrative episode (“Y”), though when leyning there is a different melody for the end of a section.

While the wayyiqṭol form is used for narrating things that happened in a real or fictional past, BH uses another narrative form for future narrative, prophecy, or instructions: the wəqaṭal, synchronically the perfective preceded by -.
天含青海道。城頭月千里。
/tʰiæn ɣɑm tsʰieŋ.hɑ́i dʱɑ́u ‖ ʑʱeŋ dʱəu ᵑgyæɾ tsʰiæn lí/
The sky swallows the road to Kokonor. On the Great Wall, a thousand miles of moonlight.
—/lí ɣɑ̀/ (李賀), tr. A. C. Graham
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WeepingElf
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Re: Hypothetical conlang with strange tense system

Post by WeepingElf »

Warren Cowgill had an explanation of the Insular Celtic absolute vs. conjunct conjugation by a similar feature, a second-position clitic *es 'it is (that)'. When the verb was the first word in the sentence, this clitic would follow the verb and protect the personal endings from phonetic erosion, resulting in the absolute conjugation. When there was a preverb before the verb, the clitic attached to that, and the personal endings were eroded, resulting in the conjunct conjugation.
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Pāṇini
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Re: Hypothetical conlang with strange tense system

Post by Pāṇini »

WeepingElf wrote: 25 Mar 2023 17:14 Warren Cowgill had an explanation of the Insular Celtic absolute vs. conjunct conjugation by a similar feature, a second-position clitic *es 'it is (that)'. When the verb was the first word in the sentence, this clitic would follow the verb and protect the personal endings from phonetic erosion, resulting in the absolute conjugation. When there was a preverb before the verb, the clitic attached to that, and the personal endings were eroded, resulting in the conjunct conjugation.
What does the Celtic absolute/conjunct distinction encode?
天含青海道。城頭月千里。
/tʰiæn ɣɑm tsʰieŋ.hɑ́i dʱɑ́u ‖ ʑʱeŋ dʱəu ᵑgyæɾ tsʰiæn lí/
The sky swallows the road to Kokonor. On the Great Wall, a thousand miles of moonlight.
—/lí ɣɑ̀/ (李賀), tr. A. C. Graham
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WeepingElf
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Re: Hypothetical conlang with strange tense system

Post by WeepingElf »

Pāṇini wrote: 29 Mar 2023 19:24
WeepingElf wrote: 25 Mar 2023 17:14 Warren Cowgill had an explanation of the Insular Celtic absolute vs. conjunct conjugation by a similar feature, a second-position clitic *es 'it is (that)'. When the verb was the first word in the sentence, this clitic would follow the verb and protect the personal endings from phonetic erosion, resulting in the absolute conjugation. When there was a preverb before the verb, the clitic attached to that, and the personal endings were eroded, resulting in the conjunct conjugation.
What does the Celtic absolute/conjunct distinction encode?
AFAIK, it doesn't really encode anything but the presence/absence of a preverb. It is a non-functional fossil which merely makes morphology more complicated. Hence, it is lost in Brythonic early (but left some traces in Old Welsh), and I think the modern Goidelic languages have lost it, too, though I am not sure. There is no evidence of anything like it in any Continental Celtic language, perhaps for similar reasons why they don't have initial mutations or conjugated prepositions, either (it seems as if Insular Celtic tended to run words together in ways that did not happen in Continental Celtic; also, Continental Celtic languages weren't VSO).
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