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Conlang Year, Day 99 prompt

Goal: Create any forms you need for marking tense/aspect

Note: These may be particles or auxiliaries rather than affixes.

Tip: You can create adverbs if you don’t want to mark T/A.

Work focus: Create/Make/List


Today’s goal is to create any forms you need to mark the tense/aspect distinctions you chose to include in your language. Whatever lexical sources you’re using to begin with, the final T/A-markers may be affixes, particles, or auxiliaries that occur with the verb. Then again, if you don’t want to mark tense or aspect in your language on the verb, you can instead create some basic temporal adverbs that can be handy for indicating the same kind of information. For instance, adverbs like now, then, today, later, and early can help to semantically indicate the same kinds of information marked by T/A.

If your language is more fusional, you may need to revisit the index markers you created to find ways to combine those forms with the T/A markers to create a single affix or auxiliary to indicate multiple layers of grammatical information (e.g. a prefix indicating first-person plural perfective).

As you work on creating elements, build out some sample clauses to test how forms are coming together.