Conlanging 2020-02-05

By Max Woerner Chase

I made a little more progress reading about Yucatec, and I realized something from the reading, that I think I must have been willfully ignoring somehow. Aspect and mood are related, so I should be considering mood in the context of aspect, and I can't design them as totally orthogonal systems. I mean I could, but it would be gratuitously unnatural, and harder to get "right" than combining them would be.

If I'm reading the paper right, each "aspect-mood" marker implies a "status". The "statuses" are:

I'm not up for it right now, but I think what I should do next is categorize the different AM markers by aspect and mood, and figure out how I want to express the concepts and which I want to grammatialize.

One idea that occurs to me is that it might be interesting to condense "not X but rather Y" into a conjunction of some kind, which could be used to express concepts like "tried and failed" within the verb's arguments, instead of on the verb.

For now, though, I should get ready for bed.

Good night.