Workbook
Tense and aspect in Phi
A practice companion to the manual
English keeps a shelf of shapes for one deed: sing, sings, sang, sung, singing. Phi keeps one word. meliho is the singing itself, whole, and it never bends. What moves the song through time is a handful of small particles that stand just before it: to looks back, so looks forward, and five view words say whether the song is beginning, flowing, complete, ceasing, or returning with the morning. Learn seven short sounds and every verb you will ever meet is already conjugated.
Manual chapter 14 owns the doctrine; this pamphlet is the practice ground. The skill is a pair of quick questions asked of every clause, when does this happen, and what view of it am I taking, until the questions answer themselves and the particles arrive on their own.
By the end of this pamphlet, you will be able to:
- Locate any clause in time with
to,so, or the unmarked present - Choose the view an event wears: in progress, complete, beginning, ceasing, or recurring
- Build all ten tense and aspect combinations and hear exactly what each one claims
- Keep one unfolding occasion apart from a standing pattern
- Say what stands complete at a past or future moment with
to kiandso ki - Give two views their two clauses, one boundary at a time
This pamphlet assumes the particle system in manual chapter 9 and the sentence patterns in chapter 10. Chapter 14 sections 1 through 5 are its home ground; the evidential source particles have their own pamphlet, and the full six-rank stack belongs to the three-slots pamphlet.
Hold the verb still and let time move around it.