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What is the largest inflection table you know of?

I dont mean in the sense that it is agglutinative and you can add on over and over various things but a genuine inflection table where there are either so many irregularities or dissimilarities that any potensial pattern is nearly non-existent, the amount of various factors such as cases, genders, declension type etc or aspect mood conjugation type etc for verbs and more ~~~~

Old Irish verbs, maybe: http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/didact/id ... irverb.htm

Legion wrote:Old Irish verbs, maybe: http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/didact/id ... irverb.htm

Whether or not that's largest, it's certainly impressive!
TITUS Didactica should be listed on our "Resources" thread in the L&L Museum; is it?

The Encyclopedia Britannica describes the Old Irish verbal system as being "almost as complicated as Basque", so Basque might have even larger tables, but on the other hand, I've heard that Basque, despite having a large number of inflections ,is highly regular and may not be that "complicated".


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nor_N ... _table.png

Old Irish is certainly impressive... I should study it.

How did the Old Irishmen keep their conjugations straight?

Shm Jay wrote:How did the Old Irishmen keep their conjugations straight?

They didn't. They cocked them up all the time. It's just another thing that makes encountering an original OI text so utterly dispiriting.

Bristel wrote:Old Irish is certainly impressive... I should study it.

http://mvtabilitie.blogspot.com/2008/09 ... nding.html

Chibi wrote:

Bristel wrote:Old Irish is certainly impressive... I should study it.

http://mvtabilitie.blogspot.com/2008/09 ... nding.html

Pfft, I've never been known to put down a challenge like that.

Chibi wrote:

Bristel wrote:Old Irish is certainly impressive... I should study it.

http://mvtabilitie.blogspot.com/2008/09 ... nding.html

Great, now I have to rip off Old Irish for a conlang.

(Actually, I think the IE preposition thing would work pretty well in Serhes Kettw...)

Old Irish is, as always, spectacular. It seems safe to say it stretches "fusional grammatical paradigm" to the breaking point, as evidenced by the fact that it did then actually break. As that blog entry says, the center could not hold.

Someday I will come up with something just as awful in a conlang. The "contaminated verbs" are an especially delicious idea.

What about Sanskrit, it has to have been quite large? And I know my Ancient Greek text had a four-page pull-out verb chart, though that might have been for more than one verb, I don't recall.

As far as a participle system, check out the Lithuanian Participle System. The horrible part is that I'm currently working my way through Latvian and a lot of this survives into Latvian.

Viktor77 wrote:What about Sanskrit, it has to have been quite large? And I know my Ancient Greek text had a four-page pull-out verb chart, though that might have been for more than one verb, I don't recall.

As far as a participle system, check out the Lithuanian Participle System. The horrible part is that I'm currently working my way through Latvian and a lot of this survives into Latvian.

I don't really see what's so awful... Sure, a couple of forms, but they can't be any worse to inflect than adjectives or nominals, but you're referring to participles in particular. They're even so clearly Indo-European.

Viktor77 wrote:What about Sanskrit, it has to have been quite large? And I know my Ancient Greek text had a four-page pull-out verb chart, though that might have been for more than one verb, I don't recall.

The author of the blog article specifically mentions Ancient Greek and Sanskrit looking tame compared to Old Irish.

Skomakar'n wrote:I don't really see what's so awful... Sure, a couple of forms, but they can't be any worse to inflect than adjectives or nominals, but you're referring to participles in particular. They're even so clearly Indo-European.

13 participles is larger than any other Indo-European verb system that ever is or was. Not to mention each of those is declined for two persons, two genders, and five cases. How is that "not so awful?"

Nortaneous wrote:

Chibi wrote:

Bristel wrote:Old Irish is certainly impressive... I should study it.

http://mvtabilitie.blogspot.com/2008/09 ... nding.html

Great, now I have to rip off Old Irish for a conlang.

(Actually, I think the IE preposition thing would work pretty well in Serhes Kettw...)

You already make complicated phonologies compared to 90 percent of the group here... Why not make a super complex grammar?

That will be a project I'd love to see even semi-complete.

Bristel wrote:You already make complicated phonologies compared to 90 percent of the group here... Why not make a super complex grammar?

Because I know practically nothing about grammar. ;_;

I'm probably going to throw all the grammatical complexity I can come up with into Arve, actually (it wouldn't feel right in any of the other langs), which means I need to rework Serhes Kettw.

After reading this thread, I went to the library and picked up a copy of An Introduction to Old Irish.

Yeniseian languages are supposedly quite horrible in their verbal morphology, with so many strata of thematic extensions, fossilized derivativ suffixes, incorporated objects, preverbal particles etc. that some of them have spontaneously reanalyzed the morphology as suffixing rather than prefixing.

Viktor77 wrote:

Skomakar'n wrote:I don't really see what's so awful... Sure, a couple of forms, but they can't be any worse to inflect than adjectives or nominals, but you're referring to participles in particular. They're even so clearly Indo-European.

13 participles is larger than any other Indo-European verb system that ever is or was. Not to mention each of those is declined for two persons, two genders, and five cases. How is that "not so awful?"

Oh. I only saw the present participles and thought you were complaining about them, and that there were only present ones in this document.

That's an entirely different story, then. Still, even attempting having a go at that is impressive! It just makes you admirable.

Tropylium⁺ wrote:Yeniseian languages are supposedly quite horrible in their verbal morphology, with so many strata of thematic extensions, fossilized derivativ suffixes, incorporated objects, preverbal particles etc. that some of them have spontaneously reanalyzed the morphology as suffixing rather than prefixing.

Well, "spontaneously" isn't quite the word to describe it. Proto-Yeniseian was heavily prefixial, but sometime in the last several thousand years migrated into central Siberia, surrounded by languages that are suffixial. Over time it did acquire a new array of suffixes due to influence from these (primarily Uralic and Turkic) languages. What you're probably thinking of is the dual-root system of Yeniseian verbs. Historically they consisted of a single root, and could often take an incorporated noun that would (naturally) be prefixed. However (likely under the influence of the dominant local languages again), this incorporate became mandatory and lexicalized, while the original verb roots eventually faded into what are basically little more than classifiers. So yes, the reanalysis did occur, but it wasn't because of the complexity of the verbal system.


That said, yes, Yeniseian verb are very complicated, due to having a number of different verbal classes that mark things (esp. agreement markers) in different ways, and the often large gap in between the underlying forms and the surface forms. But the conjugation tables for single verbs aren't all that huge, just irregular.

Tropylium⁺ wrote:Yeniseian languages are supposedly quite horrible in their verbal morphology, with so many strata of thematic extensions, fossilized derivativ suffixes, incorporated objects, preverbal particles etc. that some of them have spontaneously reanalyzed the morphology as suffixing rather than prefixing.

Vajda mentions that in his paper on Na-Dene-Yeneseian. In Ket many verbs the root has jumped to the incorporated noun slot.

EDIT: Mecislau beat me to the bunch, dammit!