zompist bboard

I've had a thought kicking around for a while - what if you had a verb that conjugated differently in different situations - for example, as a germanic weak verb when used transitively, but as a strong verb when intransitive. So the past tense of "I see you" becomes "I seed you" but past of "I see" is "I saw."

Is this attested? Completely ridiculous? Gimmicky?

As a PS - are there any good resources on how languages that mark verb valency changes do so?

Northern Germanic words for to burn (intransitive) and to burn (transitive).
I'll use Icelandic as the example. The infinitive for both words is brenna.
I burn (intransitive) is ég brenni, and so is I burn (transitive).
They have thus been the same so far, but now, let us have a look at the preterite tense.
I burned (intransitive) is ég brann, but I burned (transitive) is ég brendi.

I know somebody is going to come say that they are brinna and bränna in Swedish, but screw you.
They are both bränna in lots of dialects, and Standard Swedish is dreadful.

English has at least one verb that conjugates differently for different senses: hang (hung/hanged). Not a valence alternation, though. But I don't see any reason why you couldn't do it; all you're really talking about is having valence marking fused with other verb markers, right?

eodrakken wrote:English has at least one verb that conjugates differently for different senses: hang (hung/hanged). Not a valence alternation, though. But I don't see any reason why you couldn't do it; all you're really talking about is having valence marking fused with other verb markers, right?

When you say it like that, it doesn't sound so strange. Yeah, I guess that's what I'm talking about. As far as "hang" goes, I wonder if you could just think about it as two homophones with very similar meanings - i.e., haven't split off too much from eachother yet.

eodrakken wrote:English has at least one verb that conjugates differently for different senses

I see it
?I'm seeing it (may be possible in the sense of "I can now see it")
I'm seeing her

I have that book
*I'm having that book
I'm having dinner

I'm hungry
*I'm being hungry
I'm being good

early PIE seems to have had two different sets of verb person-number inflections, the mi-Class for intransitive active-agentive subjects and transitive agents, and the h2e-Class for intransitive stative-patientive subjects. The stative conjugation seems to be the basis of the personal inflection in Late PIE Perfective/Non-Durative forms This is clearly a relic of an old Active-Stative morphosyntactical system in Weeping-Elf's hypothesized Proto-Europic preserved in my current project Alpic.

Kai_DaiGoji wrote:

eodrakken wrote:English has at least one verb that conjugates differently for different senses: hang (hung/hanged). Not a valence alternation, though. But I don't see any reason why you couldn't do it; all you're really talking about is having valence marking fused with other verb markers, right?

When you say it like that, it doesn't sound so strange. Yeah, I guess that's what I'm talking about. As far as "hang" goes, I wonder if you could just think about it as two homophones with very similar meanings - i.e., haven't split off too much from eachother yet.

It's precisely because they've split off enough from each other that they have different conjugational patterns. New verbs (whether a new meaning to an existing verb, or a verb ending in the existing verb) tend to follow the regular pattern by analogy, regardless of the existing conjugational pattern of the incorporated verb.

Ex:
<put, put, put>
<input, inputted, inputted>

There's also the (slightly vulgar) example of the two senses of the verb to come: come_1, "to move towards" and come_2, "to ejaculate; to orgasm", often spelled cum.

come_1 is a common, irregular verb, it always forms the past tense with a vowel change: I came (pst). come_2 has the option of conjugating that way ("The man in the porno came all over the woman's face"), but it's also common to regularize the past tense formation, which is not possible with come_1: "I cummed all over her face", *"I cummed to the grocery store". Further, I'd wager that there's a subtle semantic difference between come_2 conjugated according to come_1, and come_2 conjugated regularly. come_2 conjugated regularly seems to specifically imply ejaculation, that is, something strongly associated with male orgasm, in a way that come_2 conjugated like come_1 doesn't. It feels odd to say "The woman cummed while having sex" instead of "The woman came while having sex", although the former does occur, but there's nothing odd about "The man cummed on something".

Maybe the distinction is that come_2 conjugated regularly is coming to mean "ejaculation directed at/towards somthing", an action which has two logical participants and would make come_2 tend towards having a complement, while come_2 conjugated like come_1 is coming to mean "have the physical experience of orgasm", without the implication of ejaculation, which licenses that sense to apply equally to men and women, without needing a complement.

Not the best example, but:

Les Misérables wrote:I dreamed a dream in time gone by

Cf. the intransitive use "I dreamt that I was a fish".

Classical Japanese sort-of had this: For example, the transitive/intransitive pair akeru / aku used to both be aku in their predicative form. (Full conjugation: ak-e-, ak-e-, ak-u, ak-uru, ak-e-, ak-e / ak-a-, ak-i-, ak-u, ak-u, ak-e-, ak-e)

English also has a well-known process of "systematic regularisation" with what might be called "rederived" verbs. The classic example is a bit of American baseball terminology:

fly (v.) -> fly ball -> fly (v.)

"The batter flied out to center." (I.e. The batter hit a fly ball to center field which was caught by an opposing player.)

Con quesa's cum may also fit into this category. I think cum/cummed may be derived from the noun cum/come rather than directly from the associated verb.

Another example, from a bit of RPG terminology:

sleep (n., v.) > sleep spell > sleep (v.)

"He sleeped five of the orcs." (I.e. He cast a sleep spell which put five of the orcs to sleep.)

con quesa wrote:There's also the (slightly vulgar) example of the two senses of the verb to come: come_1, "to move towards" and come_2, "to ejaculate; to orgasm", often spelled cum.

come_1 is a common, irregular verb, it always forms the past tense with a vowel change: I came (pst). come_2 has the option of conjugating that way ("The man in the porno came all over the woman's face"), but it's also common to regularize the past tense formation, which is not possible with come_1: "I cummed all over her face", *"I cummed to the grocery store". Further, I'd wager that there's a subtle semantic difference between come_2 conjugated according to come_1, and come_2 conjugated regularly. come_2 conjugated regularly seems to specifically imply ejaculation, that is, something strongly associated with male orgasm, in a way that come_2 conjugated like come_1 doesn't. It feels odd to say "The woman cummed while having sex" instead of "The woman came while having sex", although the former does occur, but there's nothing odd about "The man cummed on something".

Maybe the distinction is that come_2 conjugated regularly is coming to mean "ejaculation directed at/towards somthing", an action which has two logical participants and would make come_2 tend towards having a complement, while come_2 conjugated like come_1 is coming to mean "have the physical experience of orgasm", without the implication of ejaculation, which licenses that sense to apply equally to men and women, without needing a complement.

Not sure if it adds anything to the discussion, but Swedish of course has a cognate to come, which is komma, and this word is irregular too.

We have borrowed the English semantics of come/cum as well, into our own komma.
No matter if we mean cum or not, though, we will always use the irregular reflection as usual.

I'm so happy with the direction my thread has taken.

linguoboy wrote:English also has a well-known process of "systematic regularisation" with what might be called "rederived" verbs. The classic example is a bit of American baseball terminology:

fly (v.) -> fly ball -> fly (v.)

"The batter flied out to center." (I.e. The batter hit a fly ball to center field which was caught by an opposing player.

Another example is ring: "He rang the bell" vs. "He ringed the date in his calendar".

Echobeats wrote:

linguoboy wrote:English also has a well-known process of "systematic regularisation" with what might be called "rederived" verbs. The classic example is a bit of American baseball terminology:

fly (v.) -> fly ball -> fly (v.)

"The batter flied out to center." (I.e. The batter hit a fly ball to center field which was caught by an opposing player.

Another example is ring: "He rang the bell" vs. "He ringed the date on his calendar".

As a baseball fan, I'll say the usually terminology I hear is "Flew out to center."

linguoboy wrote:English also has a well-known process of "systematic regularisation" with what might be called "rederived" verbs.

A similar thing can happen with nouns too. Some people say mouses for more than one computer mouse. I'm trying to think of other examples... maybe the Maple Leafs hockey team?

eodrakken wrote:

linguoboy wrote:English also has a well-known process of "systematic regularisation" with what might be called "rederived" verbs.

A similar thing can happen with nouns too. Some people say mouses for more than one computer mouse. I'm trying to think of other examples... maybe the Maple Leafs hockey team?

I was playing the game Careers the other day, where one must collect a ceratain amount of happinesses and fames in order to win.

linguoboy wrote:English also has a well-known process of "systematic regularisation" with what might be called "rederived" verbs. The classic example is a bit of American baseball terminology:

fly (v.) -> fly ball -> fly (v.)

"The batter flied out to center." (I.e. The batter hit a fly ball to center field which was caught by an opposing player.)

Con quesa's cum may also fit into this category. I think cum/cummed may be derived from the noun cum/come rather than directly from the associated verb.

Another example, from a bit of RPG terminology:

sleep (n., v.) > sleep spell > sleep (v.)

"He sleeped five of the orcs." (I.e. He cast a sleep spell which put five of the orcs to sleep.)

Yes, I agree and I have heard "flied out". As for sleep, I tend to think of that as ellipsis for "to cast a sleep spell", so it's not really the same word, and I would have thoiught it';d be capitalized as well.

Sometimes people use "be" instead of "are" or "is": the powers that be, or (to take from an example I remember from this board a few years ago) "When I play D&D, I always be a mage, because that is the class that I feel comfortable with."

Kai_DaiGoji wrote:As a baseball fan, I'll say the usually terminology I hear is "Flew out to center."

As a fellow baseball fan, I more often hear "flied". We'll settle this objectively by comparing the number of World Series victories for our respective teams.

Just thought of another batch of examples: compounds with "-light", e.g. highlighted, spotlighted, greenlighted, etc. (Though the unregularised versions are also common in some cases.)

linguoboy wrote:

Kai_DaiGoji wrote:As a baseball fan, I'll say the usually terminology I hear is "Flew out to center."

As a fellow baseball fan, I more often hear "flied". We'll settle this objectively by comparing the number of World Series victories for our respective teams.

Just thought of another batch of examples: compounds with "-light", e.g. highlighted, spotlighted, greenlighted, etc. (Though the unregularised versions are also common in some cases.)

I'm a Giants fan, and you know more than me, so I yield on both counts.

Skomakar'n wrote:Northern Germanic words for to burn (intransitive) and to burn (transitive).
I'll use Icelandic as the example. The infinitive for both words is brenna.
I burn (intransitive) is ég brenni, and so is I burn (transitive).
They have thus been the same so far, but now, let us have a look at the preterite tense.
I burned (intransitive) is ég brann, but I burned (transitive) is ég brendi.

I know somebody is going to come say that they are brinna and bränna in Swedish, but screw you.
They are both bränna in lots of dialects, and Standard Swedish is dreadful.

Nitpicks: Brenn, not brenni and ég brenndi, not ég brendi.

These kinds of pairs are pretty common in Icelandic. The weak, transitive verbs derived from the intransitive strong ones are called orsakarsagnir or causative verbs. They increase their valency by one through this derivational process.

Åge Kruger wrote:I was playing the game Careers the other day, where one must collect a ceratain amount of happinesses and fames in order to win.

Interesting one. There the new sense of the noun becomes a count noun, where the original was mass. Not unlike "They ordered two waters", meaning they ordered two glasses of water.

linguoboy wrote:"He sleeped five of the orcs."

Reminds me of some conjugation humor that came up when I was playing WoW years ago. In that game you use a verb "to sheep", meaning to turn something into a sheep. A friend of mine was telling us to sheep something again when the spell ended -- this was over voice chat -- and ended up saying, "It needs to be kept shept."