Inflectional Advantages : Verbs

The final major category of words are the verbs. This makes my language rather traditional I suppose, but oh well, most languages have a similar triumvirate. The verb inflections for Eldawn will by based on three tenses, an infinitive and their negative equivalents. I've divided verbs into two categories, the abstract verbs and the material verbs. Material verbs end with [-iyo] and refer to actions like : to cut, to eat, to carry, to hold, to walk, to breathe and to talk. Abstract verbs end with [-eyo] and refer to actions like : to love, to think, to imagine, to plan and to remember.

The three temporal inflections are simply past, present and future tenses. To take 'oveyo to think' as an example :

oveyo [Infinitive] to think
ovepo [Past] did think
oveto [Present] do think 
oveco [Future] will think

A similar mechanic with the adjectives negates the verbs, namely, the addition of a [-m] as a suffix.

oveyom [N. Infinitive] not to think
ovepom [N. Past] did not think
ovetom [N. Present] do not think 
ovecom [N. Future] will not think 

A point to note is that, like the adjectives, the negative verbs do not indicate that the action performed is the exact opposite of the positive verb, but merely its absence. For example, 'eveyo to love' has the negative 'eveyom not to love' but eveyom is not the same as 'üveyo to hate'.

At the moment, the continuous tenses and perfect tenses are indicated with separate words, similar to Mandarin Chinese. The continuous marker is 'set' and is positioned before the verb. The perfect marker is 'züca'. This is also positioned before the verb. Syntactically, the verb component of a sentence would be 'perfect/continuous marker - verb - adverb'. Adverbs follow verbs the same way that adjectives follow nouns.

I'd like to go into detail for each of the tenses, for my own sake as well as yours; language construction is debilitating in the way it makes me wonder what in the world I mean when I use words. I'll put this in a simple sentence to make things clearer. 'Rices' is the first person pronoun while 'rites' is the second person pronoun. 'Iveyo' is the verb which means to advise.

Rices ivepo rites : I advised you

Rices iveto rites : I advise you

Rices iveco rites : I will advise you

Rices ivepom rites : I did not advise you

Rices ivetom rites : I do not advise you

Rices ivecom rites : I will not advise you

Rices set ivepo rites : I was advising you (I was in the midst of advising you)

Rices set iveto rites : I am advising you

Rices set iveco rites : I will be advising you (at some point in the future)

Rices züca ivepo rites : I had advised you (I advised you at some point in the past and have stopped advising you)

Rices züca iveto rites : I have advised you (I have finished advising you at the present moment)

Rices züca iveco rites : I will have advised you (by some point in the future)

I'll leave the perfect and continuous negatives to you to extrapolate. By the way, this list might help to demonstrate the advantages of inflections. Meaning can be clearly distinguished by subtle changes and can be more concisely expressed. This is all I've got for verbs in this post. I'll deal with the positively dreadful copula in the next, and the auxiliary verb in a subsequent post. 'Is' is horrible in its versatility. E-prime advocates - I hear you.