So, as a Hebrew speaker, I one day got up and thought: what if English was structured the same as Hebrew, with templates and roots instead of just suffixes and prefixes?
Well, that's partially a lie. I woke up many days and had that thought. It sounded cool. And I think many speakers of other Semitic languages who learned English had the same thought. Trying to look it up leads you to nonconcatenative morphology (isn't that a mouthful), which is a more general term that also refers to apophony - something that exists in English and is used in some plural forms of words (man-men, foot-feet) and past tenses (rise-rose). While I did actually use those verb conjugations for what I tried (more on that later), it's not identical to what I was actually looking for, which is called a transfix. Transfix is just how the morphology of verbs (and some nouns, but that's another story) in Semitic languages is referred to in English - it's called that because the affix is added across the entire word. I'm not sure it's a good way to refer to it, but I'm still studying linguistics and that's the term!
Anyway, usually when someone starts mentioning "what if we did English with nonconcatenative morphology?" people just tell them it already exists in English and they can go ahead and generalize it if they want. If anyone else did that already I didn't see it yet, though, and looking up using "transfix" instead does not give many results. Darm homonyms and all that.
Anyway, I did decide to use the irregular past tense conjugations of certain English verbs in order to create my attempted English with transfixes! I currently call it Anglit because I'm a Hebrew speaker, but if I ever develop an interesting nouning a verb template I might base it on an alternative word to speech. We'll see.
That has been a lot to say for what was supposed to be my opening to detailing things, so I'll just wrote the actual details of what I did so far under the cut. Commentary and further ideas are welcome!
All right. So first, I went on the Internet to find a list of irregular verb conjugation in English. The list I found had lots of such verbs, with irregular past conjugations, but many of them were actually variations of the now common -ed suffix, which wouldn't serve my purpose. However, many of the other irregular verbs had the past participle suffix -en, which isn't that common in English, so I went and wrote down a list of those. Out of them all there were a couple of verbs that still had the regular -ed suffix for the past tense, like proved, swelled and showed, but most of them didn't.
Next, I sorted them by what was their irregular past tense. The most common structure was (C)CoCe with 22 such verbs. With most of those, the -(e)n suffix of the past participle was added to the past tense form - though five verbs (swore, bore, wore, tore, shore [past tense of shear]) ended with r and lost the e in the past participle, and the nine (C)CiCe presemt temse verbs had it on their present tense form, with the i shortened.
Other past forms didn't have as many examples, but some worth mentioning include:
Verbs ending with w - which also lost the e in the past participle form, and had CCow as the usual present tense form, with CCew being the past tense. Draw and showed are notable exceptions to that. In a similar situation there are the verbs ending with y (or with [aj] or [ej] at the end), which sometimes had the y in the past tense turn into a w. What can I say, semivowels are a nightmare. Lie, as in to lie down, is a notable example of when it didn't happen.
CaCe verbs. Most of them are CiC in the present tense, and their past participle is based on it instead of the past tense. Same for CooC verbs - the only two I found are took and shook, both of which have CaCe as their present tense, which is used for their past participle. Only one verb with irregular past conjugation I managed to find has CooC(e) as its present tense, and that's choose. It's in the largest group mentioned above.
CiC verbs. They're generally CiCe (with one CighC, but the pronunciation is the same) in the present tense. Their past participle is based on their past tense. And yeah, they should belong to the train that is the previous point.
Get and fall. They're not even alike, as their past tenses seem to swap - got and fell. But it's a neat, if weird, cycle. True, fall isn't foll, but to my ears it sounds way too similar.
There were a couple of verbs that just didn't belong anywhere in particular, because their past tense didn't have any other examples or was the regular -ed suffix. Some of those went through an attempted draft to an existing past tense paradigm. Others - such as strike - have a different deal with their past tense, with a paradigm that just doesn't have any other representatives with the -en past participle, so they're mostly just floating there.
Within the (C)CoCe paradigm for past tenses, I sorted the verbs according to their present tense. Nine of them had the (C)CiCe structure as present tense - which would make 13 with that present tense structure on the list in general. Further eight were CCeaC, but five of those are pronounced with a short e sound, as well as one verb not of these eight thar actually has a short e sound - swell. Though to be fair, the past tense "swole" with this one is out of use, so maybe it belongs with get-got. I suppose swole isn't pronounced with a long o. Anyway, there's also freeze to join the other three with the long ea sound (speak, steal, shear). And break, while also spelled this way, is pronounced more similarly to wake. So it also isn't in this group - which is too bad, since if I grouped based on spelling it would mean I have two groups with nine members, while swell, freeze and wake are left to fend for themselves. Which would actually cover it all. Hum. In addition to wake being an CaCe verb, similarly to take and shake. Maybe becoming Wook would do it good. And having its past participle be waken. I think it does have precedence. Freeze, meanwhile, can join choose! Anyway, sorry for the mess. Writing about it helped me think a bit.
Now, all this just gives me existing verbs in English. What do I do with that? Well, in theory, move on to find other verbs with familiar structures and seeing how they work. Let's see some possibilities:
Live is pronounced like give, and likely got its e in a similar way to it (short version: some medieval scribes thought a word can't end with a v). So, in theory, its past tense would be lave, and liven its past participle - which might actually already exist as a word, maybe I missed it.
Like, on the other hand, is similar to ride or bite. If we liken it to ride, it becomes loke. If it's more like bite, it'll be lik. Either way, likken or licken would be the past participle.
I have started listing other irregular past tenses, as well as looking at other verbs with old -en forms that're out of use (molten, holden), and trying to figure out ones with widely unrelated past tense conjugation (go-went-gone, be-was-been). Maybe I'll elaborate in the future. Lately I also thought of moving the future tense clitic 'll to the start of the verb instead of the end of a pronoun, maybe while creating a different form for future tense and making it an imperative tense (or mood? Apparently?). Anyway, please share any thoughts you might have on the project so far! It's true that I currently mostly work with verbs of one vowel or diphthongs only, which is weird since most all Hebrew templates work on two vowels, but that's all I have for now.
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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.
How Trump’s split-screen presidency transfixes a divided US
How Trump’s split-screen presidency transfixes a divided US
On one side of the screen, President Trump sits pensively, leaning forward, tapping his fingers together. Next to him, a smiling Kim Jong-un takes his seat. On the other side of the screen sits Michael Cohen.
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