Saturday, December 10, 2016

Golboren - Verb Tense Reconstruction

So I learned from a Quora post that Turkish does not use the present perfect tense. Fascinated, I looked into other language groups and, if perfect tenses are missing, how they express specific timespans for actions and the events and the like. Turns out, there are many language groups without perfect tenses, and it does not limit their expression of specific thoughts and concepts.

This post is a great one that talks about varying tenses and functionality without them. Here is an excerpt from it:

"The following sentence, out of the blue, can be either past or present, through a quirk of verb morphology:
(7) When I put my books away, I set them on the shelf.
(7) can describe a past tendency, or a current one... out of the blue.  But you would hardly ever start a conversation with this sentence.   In a conversation, it would be more appropriate, but we would already have established if we were talking about the past or the present (or the future, using the present tense form!).  So in any realistic context, (7)'s ambiguity gets resolved immediately.  And that's the principle at work in tenseless languages."

I've hated the verb tenses in Golboren since I scrapped them together. The perfect ones, specifically, were awful. With the help of this new brain food, I've been motivated to now scrap the old perfect tense suffixes and refine the basic tense ones instead. Certain turns of phrase will now be developed to express ideas in an alternative way to the perfect tense.

Here is a verb sheet example of what the tenses looked like before. They were very confusing:
 Golboren English
 Present Active Ahonek Howls
 Present Passive Ahoneko is Howling
 Pres. Perfect Ahonesa has Howled
 Past Ahonok Howled
 Past Perfect Ahonosa had Howled
 Future Ahodo    will Howl
 Future Perfect Ahodosa will have Howled
 Misc. Ahoda 
 Ahon
 Howler 
 a/the Howl
They all looked a bit like one another, but too much so.  Here is an updated list of the tenses:

 Golboren English
 Present Active Ahonek Howls
 Past Ahonok Howled
 Future Ahonar    will Howl
 Misc. Ahoda 
 Ahodar
 Howler 
 a/the Howl
The Misc. section contains more possibilities than that depending on which verb is being profiled. Like the verb 'Dulga' which means 'Climb' may have -adai in its misc. section, which makes 'Dulgadai', 'Climbable.'

As of right now, I'm going back through all of the verbs I had on my Learn Golboren webpage and updating them to this new system. When I have more tone words developed, I will drop some examples of the perfectless system and how they specify things that we would use the perfect tenses for.

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