There are languages with something called a tense-aspect-mood system. If any of you are familiar with English tenses, you might be familiar with past, present, and future tenses. Well, it's actually past and present/non-past, with the future tense expressed with auxiliaries. There are languages without tenses at all, though they do possess auxiliary methods like adverbs or time phrases. A number of languages have 20 separate tenses, a number of them being mixtures between tenses and aspects, and moods as well.
There are tenses like the habitual tense(a tense mixed with the habitual aspect), which describes verbs occurring universally. A number of languages also distinguish events occurring in the recent past versus those that occurred long ago, like the recent and remote past, and the same thing for the future, like the recent and remote future. Some do it for hypotheticals, others for events occurring in the past relative to another verb(relative tenses), etc. Though some of what Biblaridion namedropped regarding habitual tenses and hypothetical/subjunctive tenses might be wrong, as evidenced by when we get to later paragraphs. There is also a tense called "future in the past", which might be self-explanatory.
Aspects are the manner in which verbs occur independently of the timeframe, the perfective(which showcases the doing has occurred within a single point in time and might suggest its completion) and imperfective(which showcases the doing occurring over an indefinite point in time or is happening continuously in some way) aspects being the most common. Perfectives could evolve from verbs like "(to) finish", "(to) come", "(to) have", etc. Imperfectives could be marked using verbs like "(to) be", or inferred from the verb's unmarked form.
Other types of aspects exist, like an inchoative aspect(which showcases the verb is about to occur and could evolve from verbs like "(to) start/begin", "(to) come", etc.), a habitual aspect(which showcases the verb occurs regularly and could evolve from verbs like "(to) know", "(to) like", "(to) live" etc.), a usitative(or past habitual) aspect(could evolve from the past tense of the habitual aspect as well as verbs like "(to) stay", "(to) live", etc.), and many others. Aspects like conditional and gnomic are also a thing. There's a whole list of them on Wikipedia, and it also shows what the aspects behave like in a language. A number of Wikipedia articles classify some aspects as being parts of other ones, though they might be wrong on that.
Moods are also a thing and use inflection to encrypt the speaker's attitude to whatever they're saying. The indicative mood is the most basic and is used for stating something the speaker considers to be true. The subjunctive mood is for stating various different elements that currently aren't the case, including wishes, emotions, possibilities, judgments, opinions, obligations, or future stunts. The category's broadness leads to the need for extra particles to specify meaning.
Other moods overlap with the subjunctive. The optative mood is one of them. This mood expresses hopes, wishes, and commands. The conditional mood expresses something the speaker believes is possibly true. The imperative mood is for direct commands, requests, and apparently demands. The interrogative mood is for the expression of questions and the hypothetical mood is for hypotheticals. There are many others, with another list existing on Wikipedia for grammatical moods, both realis and irrealis, whatever those two words mean.
With this knowledge of the many tenses, aspects, and moods in mind, for tenses, I'll go for the past and non-past, and for aspects, the perfective, imperfective, and habitual. For auxiliaries, a word for "(to) hope" is for the future tense, "(to) come" for the perfective, and "(to) know" for the habitual. I'm considering either leaving the imperfective unmarked, or using "(to) do" for it. Tell me in the comments which choice might be good enough.
There is also the copula, which refers to a language's word for "be" and its various tense and number forms. It's used in many different ways across different languages, while in synthetic ones, it's attached to nouns with affixes. I'm thinking our sample language as a protolang could be analytical, though I don't know the methods analytical languages use copulas.
I asked people about it, and got a response:
"These are just a few uses of "be" in English, some of which are copular:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime#Different_functions_of_%22to_be%22>
A copula doesn't have much meaning on its own, so you could reasonably use it for just about any kind of expression besides its copula function. The same word that sometimes acts as a copula might double as an auxiliary verb, as in English. Or it might do any number of other things.
Another thing to consider is that a language might have more than one copula. Many languages have a locative copula and another one for identification/possession/existentials. Some languages have three or more different copulas.
<https://www.google.com/search?q=Oriya+%22copulas%22+filetype:pdf>
Also, consider what a null copula will mean in your language.
For example, maybe
'apple green' "The apple is the green kind."
'apple COP1 green' "There is a green kind of apple there."
'apple COP2 green' "The apple is unripe." "
I'm thinking of limiting this language's copulas to the words for "be", "feel", "look/see", and "taste".
There is also valency, which dictates a verb's ability to take an object. There are intransitive verbs, with only take subjects. The English verb "jump" classifies as an intransitive. Transitive verbs are the opposite and can take objects. Some of them seem lacking as they don't solely state the object itself, "entangle" being one of them. Many languages develop methods of taking intransitive verbs and altering them to create transitive ones, and vice versa. These methods are known as valency-changing operations, the most notable being the passive and the causative.
The passive can be used to convert transitive sentences into intransitive equivalents, backgrounding the old subject or getting rid of it completely, deleting the subject, and making the object take its place. Passives could evolve from a number of different verbs, including "(to) have", "(to) take", "(to) come", "(to) be", etc. In this case, "(to) gain".
Causatives add the sense of "to cause to perform the verb" to transitive sentences, granting the free addition of extra objects whenever the speaker feels like it. English lacks robust morphological causative, which can be seen as disappointing as causatives serve as a very useful method of creating new verbs, and are just as easy to evolve, if not easier. They could evolve from verbs like "(to) cause", "(to) command", "(to) give", "(to) make", etc. The causative for this sample language is evolved from "(to) command".
With all this in mind, we could then create our root words, and our lexicon, which will be done in the next chapter. And for good measure, I could bring up the rise of a number system, and a writing system.
Building The Grammar
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