Re: any language without person/number marking you know?

Seán O'Leathlóbhair wrote:
Helmut Richter wrote:

I had written:


Consider Swahili "nitacheka" (I will laugh). The syllable ni- is the
person, so the verb form is dependent on person. Would you write it in
three words "ni (I) ta (will) cheka (laugh)", the verb form were
independent of person and tense. Other persons are "utacheka", "atacheka"
etc., other tenses are "nilicheka", "ninacheka" etc.

A much nearer example is spoken French: the verb is dependent on person
[Z@ri] (I laugh), [tyri] (you laugh) etc., and just like in Swahili, the
pronouns ([mwa] (I), [twa] (you)) are only used for emphasis. Other than
in Swahili, the verb affixes are written apart from the verb stem so that
they look like separate words: "je ris", "tu ris". But they are no
separate words because they, other than the pronouns "moi" and "toi",
never occur separate from verbs.


For a while, you had me wondering whether any language could be
considered to conjugate verbs by a change in its orthography. Iwork,
youwork, heworks, etc. Then I changed my mind.

Although the French pronouns je and tu cannot wander far from their
verbs, they are not forced to immediately precede it. The subject and
verb may be inverted, object pronouns may come between them, or the
negative particle ne may also do so. How do you say, I don't laugh?

Je ne ris pas. /Z@n@ripA/ or /ZnripA/. But still, the order is absolutely prescribed. Off the top of my head:

subject [ne] [se] [me|te|nous|vous]{1,2} [le|la|les|se] [lui|leur] [y] [en] verb-base

Nothing can intervene (ignoring old, set expressions like "Je soussigné ....").

Still, the pattern is non-agglutinative to the extent that the verb-base itself undergoes transformations for person and number that aren't completely independent of tense. For example, with first conjugation verbs, in each case with the appropriate stem:

Indicative Present: -, -, -, /o~/, /e/, -
Indicative Future: /E/, /A/, /A/, /o~/, /e/, /o~/
Indicative Imperfect or Conditional: /E/, /E/, /E/, /jo~/, /je/, /E/
Indicative Preterite: /E/, /A/, /A/, /Am/, /At/, /Er/
Subjunctive Present: -, -, -, /jo~/, /je/, -
.