Table of Contents

Verb forms

Infinitive

Proposal 1
Proposal 2
Proposal 3
Open questions

Should a special infinitive marker be used like the English to (to run), German zu, Norwegian å, Swedish att, …?

Active/present participle

Can this participle be pluralized? Presumably yes, in which case this must be borne in mind when designing it.

Proposal 1
Proposal 2
The -ive suffix

Does this participle cover meanings corresponding to English “-ive” words (“-ema” in Esperanto)? Examples include: creative, assertive, interrogative.

Passive/past participle

Can this participle be pluralized? Presumably yes, in which case this must be borne in mind when designing it. And we should also bear in mind the morphology of the similar past/preterite form.

Proposal 1
Proposal 2
Proposal 3

Tempus (for indicative)

Present

Proposal 1
Proposal 2

Past

Proposal 1
Proposal 2
Proposal 3
The de-de bounce

I, User_ob, might be making a mountain out of a molehill here, but I wanted to say something about repetition of the “duh” syllable. If the past ending is -de or -ede, then if the next word is the definite article, there will be 2 or 3 de's in a row, e.g. hi ledede de grup (he led the group). I think it's okay without the final E (i.e. hi leded de grup) and of course there's no “problem” if T is used in the suffix.

Future

Proposal 1
Proposal 2
Proposal 3

Modus

Imperative

Proposal 1

Volative

Non-second-person imperatives need to be considered, especially the first-person plural. The obvious solution is a let-like auxiliary, which could in principle be used for all persons and numbers. Example: lat os spisa (let us eat).

Subjunctive

Proposal 1
Proposal 2

Persona and Numerus

(No proposals i've seen so far have conjugation for personae and numeri)

Inchoative and Causative Verbs and the Middle Voice

We should consider the issues of inchoative (becoming) versus causative (making) verbs, and very similarly, the middle voice. If you know Esperanto, this corresponds to igxi and igi. The big question is: do we copy (mostly) the natlangs and just use the same verb-forms (i.e. they are “ergative” verbs) or do we make the distinction?

I think it's dodgy to use adjectives directly as verbs. The provisional causative suffix is -en, so an example causative-verb phrase is: ik troken de plat (I'm drying the plate). For the inchoative version, the options are:

Regarding the middle voice, this relates to verbs in general. An example verb is “burn” and an example phrase is “the coal is burning”, which can be interpreted as reflexive or causative. For this, and the unambiguous example of “we're burning the coal”, the simple scenario of not making a distinction yields these translations: de kol bren (ambiguous) and vi bren de kol. How should we handle these verbs?

Additional remarks