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Apr. 3rd, 2003 02:49 pmOn the way to bullshit this morning, Jake and I ended up talking about the spanish quiz which he had today, and the myriad of tenses that would be on it. Which got us onto the subject of language and inflection in general.
Jake came up with the idea of verbs not conjugating at all to show person or tense, and using auxilliaries to denote these...I don't know if there's any natural language that does this, but it's an interesting idea. This, of course, got onto the subject of Latin and the seemingly endless ways in which a verb can conjugate, not even counting nominal forms, as a contrast to that idea.
I dunno. Something keeps nagging at me that there's a very good reason that such an uninflected language couldn't be fully expressive, but I can't quite articulate why.
Which reminds me that taking a linguistics class one day might be interesting. But that's certainly a 'then' problem.
Jake came up with the idea of verbs not conjugating at all to show person or tense, and using auxilliaries to denote these...I don't know if there's any natural language that does this, but it's an interesting idea. This, of course, got onto the subject of Latin and the seemingly endless ways in which a verb can conjugate, not even counting nominal forms, as a contrast to that idea.
I dunno. Something keeps nagging at me that there's a very good reason that such an uninflected language couldn't be fully expressive, but I can't quite articulate why.
Which reminds me that taking a linguistics class one day might be interesting. But that's certainly a 'then' problem.
