*hand-wiggles* It's more that verbs take affixes (prefixes for future, suffixes for past) to mark tense; if you slap them onto nouns, then they're the copula in that tense instead. Present tense just doesn't bother marking the copula at all. It means they can also attach a sort of participle-style weight to a lot of nouns and adjectives...
...god, I wish I hadn't lost my notes. I had way too much fun with that language, and wrote quite bad poetry within it. The phonology was dreadful--all Japanese-plus-Latin with a very restrictive CVC syllable setup and no nod to euphony beyond my own preferences--and the whole thing never quite gelled because I couldn't figure out how to handle relative clauses without just copying Latin, but by god, I liked my verbs.
no subject
...god, I wish I hadn't lost my notes. I had way too much fun with that language, and wrote quite bad poetry within it. The phonology was dreadful--all Japanese-plus-Latin with a very restrictive CVC syllable setup and no nod to euphony beyond my own preferences--and the whole thing never quite gelled because I couldn't figure out how to handle relative clauses without just copying Latin, but by god, I liked my verbs.