Conlanging 2020-01-29

By Max Woerner Chase

I took a stab at assigning Dabupan aspects to the sentences in Schleicher's fable, and I've come to two conclusions.

One is that I need a better intuitive grasp on aspect, because I have confused myself mightily.

The other is that I need a better idea of how I want to handle relative clauses, because my impulse was to mostly break them out into their own sentence. I'm going to have to figure out how to make this work with aspect, and it's possible I'm going to need to redo some of the aspect verbs.

Thinking about how I would paraphrase a relative clause that had associated aspects...

"The man who builds a house" "The man who is building a house" "The man who builds houses" "The man who constantly builds houses" "The man who builds as house as a result" "The man who caused this by building a house"

These phrases don't sound invalid, but my inclination is that the second should be the easiest to say, and if I'm going to do that, I need to shuffle around the aspect verbs.

So, what I need to figure out now is how to have imperfective be unmarked, and mark perfective.

Another possibility is that I'll want to have multiple paradigms of aspect, depending on the lexical aspect of the meaning verb.

This is all a lot to consider right now, and for the moment, I'll wrap up, and tomorrow do some more research.

Good night.