Thursday, June 7, 2012

Conjugating Verbs, Sort Of

"Conjugating A Verb"

This is not exactly about conjugating a verb. But I don't know the right name for it.

In high school Spanish class we conjugated a verb in a tense by listing the forms for 1st-person-singular, 2nd-person-singular, and so on through 3rd-person-plural.

Here I want to list verb, past, and past participle:

stink, stank, stunk

borrow, borrowed, borrowed

drink, drank, drunk
(I drink a glass of water, I drank a glass of water, I have drunk a glass of water. I think that's correct.)

sink, sank, sunk
I sink, I sank, I have sunk.

sing, sang, sung

think, thank, thunk
But no.
think, thought, thought

Think is an irregular verb. That's one more little thing that makes English more difficult.


Let's reinvent that verb:
think, thank, thunk
I think of it, I thank of it, I have thunk of it.

But the problem with that is: "thank" is already taken. It means to thank a person, as in "Thank you".

But there's a work-around for that. One can rely on auxiliary verbs to express the various verb forms:

I think of it. I did think of it. I have think of it. (Or, I have thinked of it.)

Or maybe this:
I think of it. I did think of it. I have thunk of it.

Years ago I took a little beginner's correspondence course in Esperanto. It was 10 lessons. It was given to me, and my work checked, by another dance partner of one of my dance partners (20 years ago when I round-danced). So I know a little about Esperanto. Esperanto is an invented language (as distinct from most languages which come into being naturally without a deliberate, thorough, logical design). One of the main characteristics of Esperanto is the regularity of its forms such as grammar, spellings, verb forms, and so on. It has very few exceptions. It has very few, if any, irregular verbs. I still have an old weatherbeaten Esperanto-English paperback dictionary he gave me, the pages all separated from the binding by now. Esperanto grammar is so simple that it's listed as "The Sixteen Rules of Esperanto Grammar" in the front of this dictionary. Verb forms are also simpler than in English. On page 30 of the dictionary it shows:
mi amas (I love), mi amis (I loved), but no pas participle on that page. All verbs have -as for present tense, and -is for past tense. Page 11 says to avoid compound tenses where possible. See, Esperanto makes an effort to keep things simple. However, participles in Esperanto do exist and they all end in "a". On page 10 I figure out that "I have loved" would be "Mi estas ama".

If English were regular, as Esperanto is regular, then instead of "think, thought, thought", or "think, thank, thunk", we might have something like this:
think, thinked, thinka
I think, I thinked, I have thinka
Or:
thinkas, thinkis, thinka
I thinkas, I thinkis, I have thinka.

1 comment:

  1. Esperanto is in fact more widespread than people imagine. It is now in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide. It is the 29th most used language in Wikipedia, ahead of Danish and Arabic. It is a language choice of, Skype, Firefox, Ubuntu and Facebook and Google translate recently added to its prestigious list of 64 languages.

    Native Esperanto speakers, (people who have used the language from birth), include World Chess Champion Susan Polger, Ulrich Brandenberg the new German Ambassador to and Nobel Laureate Daniel Bovet. Financier George Soros learnt Esperanto as a child.

    Esperanto is a living language - see http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670

    Their online course http://www.lernu.net has 125 000 hits per day and Esperanto Wikipedia enjoys 400 000 hits per month. That can't be bad :)

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