wikipedia: “will” could become an inflectional suffix, such as “i needill your help” instead of “i will need your help”
me: but will as an auxiliary and ‘ll as a clitic both come before the verb, so wouldn’t it make more sense for them to become grammaticalized as prefixes, i.e. “i illneed your help?”
(”i illneed your help” and “i’ll need your help” would be pronounced almost exactly the same anyway, so further phonological evolution would be needed to obscure it.)
(if it were a conlang. which it’s not.)
or are we assuming that future english speech communities would recognize the pattern of “tense/aspect change goes on the end of the verb” (e.g. -ed, -s, -ing) and so would also append ill to the end of the verb by analogy as opposed to pure concatenation?
huh. i wonder which strategy is more common, cross-linguistically?










