Auxiliary words

will, shall, would,should, may, might,  ought,



These auxiliary verbs cannot stand on their own in English. Other auxiliary words, like can and must, are simple meaning verbs unto themselves.

We dropped the stand alone usage fr auxiliaries. They became verbal modifiers  which greatly simplifies every speech. Being distinct words, they do not interfere with verb pronunciation, and the verb can remain stable, the auxiliaries providing tense.

When there is no written paper to act as dictionary, then the goal is to minimize alterations of the root so the listener can focus on acquiring many more stable roots leaving the tense modifiers to a few externals auxiliaries.

Consider  'need and needed', two tenses, one borrowed from Latin past participle. Then we: can need, needed, will need, have needed will be needing. No change to the stem vowel need.  

There are a lot of objects needed to survive in IE land. The children must sing the praises to the various objects in life to keep current in the dialect, otherwise severe drift and loss of history.

 Thus a tendency to find and sing the root word of everything around the village. Roots first then adding small suffix or prefix is a natural phenomena of memory, when we have no external aids. There are few written signs or marks mostly carved in trees or written on bark.  

Oral languages only work with stable stems (or roots). There is a way to test this.  Identify the number of syllables we can make, identify the number of syllables we can remember  in casual conversation. Then count the items in the everyday world of the speaker. That research should almost certainly find a fairly stable outcome, maybe a few hundred root words can be supported while retaining a beat for pre and post modifiers.  The conversations have to keep the attention and convey the message. Village life is not that complicated, a closed world.