Tuesday 8 May 2012

Enunciation of verbs

This question just occurred to me once. How would you enunciate verbs in the Tulvan language? For example, if you had a Tulvan language dictionary, how would verbs appear there? As it happens I do have a Tulvan language dictionary, hehe, which I use for myself and I thought this would be something interesting to post, since it refreshes the notion of verbal morphology in Tulvan.

So how do you do it? First of all there are 4 paradigms to have in mind when talking about Tulvan verbs. The first one is the normal present tense paradigm, the form of the verb with no changes at all. The second one is the past tense, with the infixation seen in past posts. The third is the infixed perfective participle as explained above. And finally we have the infinitive with the defusing.

So for instance a verb like lev, should be included in the dictionary in this way:

lev. luev, leyv, leu. [leʋ] vb. to see, to look.

Some other examples of how to enunciate verbs are:

tulv. taulv, tuylv, tulu. [tulʋ] vb. to think, to ponder.
cur. caur, cuyr, cur. [kur] vb. to want.
thark. thuark, thayrk, tharz. [θarkʰ] vb. to use, to employ.

Finally we have an irregular verb, the verb ëv 'to be':

ëv. äv, ëü, eu. [jeʋ] vb. to be, to exist.

This last verb uses an irregular contraction to form the past and perfective paradigms. This verb further changes when weak tense prefixes are applied. So, for instance, you get këv, käv, kaëv, kuëv, kyav, for the different weak tenses and their prefixes.

From these forms the different tenses can be easily made out. So, to make the Strong Tenses: The Present Tense is the basic form, then the past is also part of the paradigms, the perfective participle as well, finally the imperative uses the basic form plus an -i suffix and the subjunctive does the same from the form of the Past Tense. The Weak Tenses use the prefix ki- plus the present and past tense forms, and then we have the Perfect, Future and Conditional that each use a prefix, namely; ka-, ku- and kya- respectively.

For further information see the post for Strong Tenses and Weak Tenses.

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