Right. After my possibly stupid linguistics post, I'm ready to post something more experimental - this time about my attempt at English-with-transfixes again! Because while I barely move forward with it, I still have some thoughts.
So here's the thing. In most Semitic languages, transfixes include two or more vowels. Two letter roots are heavily debated, and most claim they don't exist. They definitely do in English if you go at it the way I did, but I'll see what I can do. Either way: mostly two vowels. And nearly all of the verbs with irregular past conjugation have one vowel. That is, except about three or four: forgive, forbid, forswear and begin. All of those are made of a prefix and another verb: for-give, for-bid, for-swear, be-gin.
Or, well, there's one exception: begin does have a prefix, but unlike the others, the word sans prefix doesn't exist in Modern English. Hasn't for a while now, really. However, it is in the etymology of the word, and its irregular past conjugation reflects that by leaving the first vowel unchanged even in the past tense: begin, began, begun.
That, of course, means I can't use this to build a good two-vowel paradigm. Not based on this at least. I thought of adding the original word to my new version of English, but it seems its meaning is already nearly identical to "begin" so it'd be a bit weird. The be- prefix might be useful for some things, so I can consider that, but it doesn't seem likely. The original word was something like ginnan, BTW, and I very much get how the n's (and the a) slowly disappeared. The conjugations of the old ancestor of "begin" in Old English don't seem that helpful for my purposes. So if I will add it, it would be gin-gan-gun (past participle of gin, not to be confused with the weapon). I think I can leave the be- prefix be.
Now, this is slightly inconvenient to me. However, I now have, due to that, an interesting idea. Since one vowel change is, for now, enough to imply the tense of the action (and I'm working on an imperative/future form for that), I can add a second vowel between the consonants that usually cluster in English verbs. And I can use this vowel for a completely different conjugation purpose: namely, for the person and number conjugation. Of course, that would require me to invent it from the ground up. It would make some verbs really weird, and probably clash with two letter roots. But I suppose we'll see how that goes.
But why person and number, you ask? Well, you see, despite such conjugations being largely absent from English verbs (save the s suffix in third person singular present tenses), it does in fact exist for one verb to some degree: the verb "to be". In the present tense, it has different conjugation depending on person and number: first person singular is "am", third person singular is "is", and all the plurals are "are". The second person singular used to be "art", but like the second person singular it has largely disappeared. "Is" is also used for things with the "it" pronoun, the third person nonhuman.
Of course, all these conjugations came in through suppletion, so they have no relation (or nearly no relation) to one another and thus are useless in building a proper paradigm for such conjugations in other verbs. But their very existence means that there is some precedence in English to this, which is a great jumping point in my opinion.
Still, wish me luck! I'm going to need it where I'm going.
