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Conlang Year, Day 109 prompt

Goal: Review verb inflections to add in dictionary entries

Note: Focus especially on any forms that are irregular or not fully predictable.

Tip: It can be helpful even if the forms are rather predictable.

Work focus: Organize/Plan/Structure


You’ve written up information about verb inflections and entered verbs into the dictionary, but today’s focus is a bit more detail-oriented. Reviewing your inflectional forms, are there any inflections that are more difficult to predict? For instance, sound changes may make an affix change shapes, depending on the verb it occurs with. Or perhaps some of your most frequently used verbs have irregular forms in a particular aspect or tense.

It’s helpful to add that kind of information to dictionary entries so that when you pull up the verb’s entry, you can see right away that certain forms might differ from the otherwise established pattern in the language.

Even if some inflectional forms tend to be predictable, you may consider including them in all your verb entries as a way of testing forms (you may find that some verbs will have less regular affixes due to sound changes that way!) and as a way of double-checking your inflectional system to make sure it works with all the forms you’ve created.