halonia : languages & cultures

can you tell that I started this language before I knew Things About Linguistics (and especially typology and language change)

the vowels on the left are the first vowel in the word. and these morphemes are all prefixes, also, that’s not really clear. (the VC in future indicates a reduplicative morphological process that is… still… a prefix? …I think?) basically these are indicators of lexical verb class, as this works right now. but they were based on the concept of the er/ir/re verb distinction in french - in other words, these really ought to be allophones. they were supposed to be. …they are not even a little bit.

(and my use of the word ‘tense’ is ah rather suspect here. I expect I did not know what ‘mood’ and ‘aspect’ meant at the time.)

As was previously shown, Semberek features unusually long infixes to indicate the future and past tense. These have become reduced colloquially, depending on regional dialect. The dialect I will be dealing with most, Sembare, shows up as follows:

katar - ‘to hit’

katabar - ‘I hit (past)’
katefar - ‘you hit (past)’
katanar - ‘they hit (past)’
katorar - ‘it hit (past)’
katajar - ‘something hit (past)’ 

katibar - ‘I will hit’
katešar - ‘you will hit’
katinar - ‘they will hit’
katotar - ‘it will hit’
katijar - ‘something will hit’

The method of indicating the progressive voice varies depending on which tense the verb is already in.

In the present tense, progressive is indicated by the reduplication of the tense/person marker:

yaser - ‘to eat’

yaserbe - ‘I eat’
yaserbebe - ‘I am eating’

yaserbexe - ‘I am eating’ (colloq.) 

In future and past tenses, this would not be particularly convenient, as both are indicated by infixes. Instead, the infix is advanced:

yasabriyer - ‘I ate’
yabrisafer - ‘I was eating’

yasotaher - ‘it will eat’
yotahaser - ‘it will be eating’ 

Semberek verb conjugation can seem particularly complex to learners due to the ‘random’ feel of affix positioning, and the highly synthetic/agglutinating nature of the language - making very long verbs with difficult-to-identify roots. 

Semberek verbs must inflect for tense, subject person, and subject number.

The present tense is particularly simple. It is indicated by suffixes which also mark for person.

yaser - ‘to eat’

yaserbe - ‘I eat’
yaserfe - ‘you eat’
yaserna - ‘they eat’
yasersu - ‘it eats’ 
yaseratu - ‘something eats’

To indicate that a verb’s subject is plural, Semberek pluralizes the verb root itself:

yasirbe - we eat
yasiyirbe - we (group) eat 
yasirfe - you (pl) eat
etc. 

When it comes to future and past tense, the verbal morphology becomes a bit more complex. Instead of the easily-identified suffixes of the present, these tenses both use infixes which again indicate tense and person. (Number is still inflected on the root.) 

yasabriyer - ‘I ate’
yasatefer - ‘you ate’
yasanajiyer - ‘they ate’
yasotriyer - ‘it ate’
yasajerer - ‘something ate’

yasabrater - ‘I will eat’
yasatešefer - ‘you will eat’
yasanitajer - ‘they will eat’
yasotaher - ‘it will eat’
yasotujuter - ‘something will eat’ 

Of course, most of these (fairly long) infixes have various colloquial shortenings. These, as well as many other features of Semberek verbal morphology (including object, transitivity, progressive voice, various moods, and many aspects) will have their own posts.