Verb problem

[xain1112]

In my new language (Bübük), all of the verbs are five letters. They conjugate by taking the root and adding an ending. E.g. bübük-1st person=büba. The problem I am having is how to differentiate between verbs with the same root (bübük, bübet, bübak, etc.) because they would all change to the same thing. Any ideas?

[Vardelm]

Make verbs that are more than 5 letters/sounds. This is a very artificial limit. Also, apparently your verbs are only 5 letters/sounds, and that includes 3 for your person/number inflection. All of your verb roots then are only 2 letters/sounds, and it looks like each root is a consonant and a vowel. If you have 30 consonants and 5 vowels (for example), you have 150 possible combinations. If that's not enough for your language (and it's probably not), then you need to change it.

You could maybe add some kind of suprasegmentals (tone, etc.). That's about it.

IMO, scrap the 5 letter/sound limitation & start over.

[Aurora Rossa]

I imagine the language would simply avoid having so many roots distinguished only by the final syllable if grammatical inflection overrides it so pervasively. Roots like that would presumably fall out of use and get replaced with more easily distinguishable ones.

[xain1112]

Thanks, I changed it to:
all verbs alternate CVCV… or VCVC…
and they all end in K
The root is everything but the last two letters.

This will make it so much easier.

[Drydic]

Play with it. mess around.

[Plusquamperfekt]

In my opinion prefixes is the solution... OK, let's say you have a CVCVC structure and 20 consonant phonemes... It's pretty obvious that you won't get thousands of different verbs with such a few amount of available sounds. What you could do instead is to create a set of 20-30 verbs with very basic meanings, so that you could specify the basic meanings by attaching prefixes... This is exactly what you can also observe in indo-european languages, for example German. Let's take the verb "schreiben":

- anschreiben - to write so. / to write sth. on sth.
- abschreiben - to copy sth.
- aufschreiben - to write down sth.. / to take down notes
- beschreiben - to describe
- einschreiben - to register
- umschreiben - to rewrite / to paraphrase
- verschreiben - to prescribe / to make an error while writing
- vorschreiben - to stipulate
- zuschreiben - to ascribe


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[Rhetorica]

I think when languages have trouble with roots that become ambiguous after inflection, they often solve the problem by conjugating badly, e.g. adding the inflection without reducing the root to the stem. English does this with the eye-scalding spelling of "singeing" (so it doesn't look like the progressive of "to sing"). If your language is naturally running into this problem due to its evolutionary history, this kind of thing may be worth considering. (Although personally I prefer Plusquamperfekt's prefix solution, especially if the inflections are older than the roots.)

...this all being said, you could try expanding your inventory if you're really hellbent on keeping 5 phonemes per word. It doesn't look like you have a pitch system, for example—the number of different one-syllable words in Chinese is mindboggling, even without the extensive use of homophony.