The Evolution of Future Tenses from Serial 'Say' Constructions in Central Eastern Bantu Robert Botne Future tense markers have been shown to arise from a variety of verbal sources, among them motion verbs and volitional verbs. In a small number of central eastern Bantu languages, a verb 'say' has developed into a future marker, a phenomenon not previously noted in the literature.
Significant commonalities exist.
This is demonstrably idiosyncratic behavior. On Hypercorrection as a Factor in Regular Phonological change Pargman Hypercorrection, as it has traditionally been defined in historical linguistics, is often described as a sporadic and irregular performance error that does not affect the structure of a language in any sort of systematic or lasting way. In this article, evidence is presented from the South Dravidian family of languages to show that such an assumption cannot be supported in all cases. Early in the history of this family, a phonological change involving umlaut operated to lower high vowels in root syllables before a low-vowel suffix. However, in one of the languages of this family, Literary Tamil, a subsequent change occurred whereby the effects of umlaut were reversed, and the resultant new pattern was hypercorrectively extended to new environments that did not originally contain the appropriate conditioning for the change.