History - 2

Much of my late 1st Phase work on Elessic was influenced by Latin. In high school, I bought a Latin textbook and started reading through it, and doing some online Latin courses. I hadn't had enough actual language instruction to understand what Cases were at this time (I took Spanish in school, not German) and declensions bewildered me.

However, I liked the sound of Latin, and so a lot my early verbs ended with "-it," which (if I remember correctly) is a common Third Person Singular verb ending in the present tense. This has since been removed, as my verbs now follow a more strict pattern based on Transitivity.

Despite my interest in Latin, German, and Esperanto, my recent addition of cases to Elessic doesn't come from where one might expect. The Accusative was not the first case I added, rather, the Dative 1 was, which was inspired by the use very convenient use of Adverbs to indicate direction in Esperanto.

In learning Esperanto, I wondered why the article "la" didn't match case or number with its Noun, since most other things do. German does this (though, its genders muddy things), and also has a convenient way of including "the" in with its prepositions, with things like "zu" ("to") becoming "zum" ("to the/a"). I tried to come up with an easy way of replicating this through suffixes that attached to prepositions, but anything that added a syllable defeated the purpose of the whole thing.

Eventually, I came up with what I have now: a method by which articles can express Case, which has the added benefit of giving me an out whenever a noun doesn't sound good with certain case markers. Furthermore, the articles remove the need for some of the more common prepositions ("to," "at," "towards"), which helps streamline things.

I still don't know exactly how I intend to handle verbs that have their meanings changed by prepositions, since it interacts with cases oddly. Esperanto has a mix of using prepositions after the verbs and using them as prefixes for the verb, which changes their meanings ("ĉerpi el" means "to draw out [as from a well]" and "elĉerpi" means "to completely use up," with "el-" capable of being used elsewhere for the same meaning), but every time I use a "kun-" verb and follow it up with "kun," it feels redundant.

It may be that I come up with standardized meanings for prepositions-as-prefixes, but this is something that will require a lot of working out.