Grammatical Attitude Marking

[wm.annis]

When I first learned about Na'vi's ‹ei› and ‹äng› infixes I was a bit surprised.  I had never encountered such things in a Human language.  Now, plenty of languages have formal marking to say that some action was a benefit or detriment to the speaker, but this "positive" vs. "negative" attitude thing was new to me.

Today I happened to be browsing some linguistics book, where I learned of a human language that does just this, via auxiliary verbs: Tamil.  It has quite a few of them, actually, mostly negative: belief that an action cannot be completed; relief that an action is over; simple negative attitude, etc.  They can combine with aspect auxiliaries in funky ways.

That's what I get for knowing almost nothing about Dravidian languages.

[ShadowedSin]

Well if I'm off in saying that the Irish think in Negative, Neutral and Positive. Sentences are either the three or not. They don't even have a yes or no. Just negative, positive, or neutral.