New Thoughts on Progressive and Perfect Aspects

Version 1.1

I have had some further thoughts on how progressive/ continuous (PROG/ CONT) and perfect (PERF) aspects are marked in Diinlang. I have been looking into adjectives and realize many of the active and passive adjectives will be formed from progressive or perfect aspects of verbs. Currently the prefixes “is-” and “ha-” are used, when necessary used in combination. If the passive prefix “ge-” is used the aspect prefixes are placed before. The euphony of “ha-” in particular may be problematic.

In English the progressive/ continuous aspect of a verb is formed with an “-ing” suffix. Rather unusually for English, this seems a consistent rule. I cannot think of any English verb that does not use this form. A three letter suffix for this seems a little long, unless “ŋ” is available as a character, but obviously this is not in practice a problem. Diinlang will have many words that end in “-ing” that will not be PROG/ CONT as has English. Again, this does not seem to be a problem in practice. Most root words in Diinlang will be relatively short so the length of a word should make it obvious it has been suffixed. Since Diinlang does not drop terminal vowels “-ing” will become “-hing” or possibly “-ying”. It may therefore be more managable to use “-in/-hin” for PROG/ CONT, verbal nouns and present participles.

In English the PERF aspect of a regular verb takes an “-ed” ending, as does the simple past. Their use is distinguished by one or more auxiliary verbs. For Diinlang it would be desirable for the two forms to be distinct without resorting to auxiliaries.

In a previous post I proposed that a simpler way of marking past tense verbs might be useful. My initial draft proposes “-d/ -id”, the phonetic equivalent of the English system. In an update I propose simple past be marked by “-t” as had already been proposed for the duoverbs. Logically this frees up “-d/ -id” for the marking of perfect aspect forms, although “-nd/ -ind” may be more workable. The use of “-ing” and “-d/ -id (-nd/ -ind)” in Diinlang results in active and passive adjectives very similar to those of English. This is useful since many users of Diinlang will have English as a first or second language. These adjectives can, of course, produce nouns.

Perfect Progressive/ Continuous aspects may be constructed using the suffix “-ind/ -hind”. Past tense of such a construction is probably best marked with “wen”.