Re: Gerund, participle, infinitive
- From: naddy@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Christian Weisgerber)
- Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2009 23:17:26 +0000 (UTC)
Athel Cornish-Bowden <acornish@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Many languages use the various tenses of the auxiliary "to have" plus
the past participle,
I have always found this curious, as it's not obvious to me why the
idea of possessing something has got mixed up with the idea of
completing something. However, one finds the same idea not only in
Romance languages like French and Portuguese, but also in Germanic
languages like English and German.
What is even more remarkable is that both Romance and Germanic
languages use both
(1) have + past participle
(2) be + past participle
for forming perfect tenses, with (2) principally used for intransitive
verbs of motion and change, e.g. French
(1) j'ai aimé (I have loved)
(2) je suis allé (I have gone)
and you need to memorize for each verb which auxiliary it takes.
Likewise in German.
English used to share this feature, too, but (2) was lost and
nowadays all verbs form their perfect like (1). The only marginal
survivor of pattern (2) in contemporary English is the phrase
"I am become death".
Among the Romance languages, French and Italian have this system
of split auxiliaries. Spanish doesn't, but I don't know if it never
existed or was lost there.
Did this arise from influence of neighbouring (but otherwise
different) languages, or is there a reasonable mental explanation?
It's an "areal feature". That's linguistic jargon for "different
languages in a geographic region share this feature and we have no
idea why". As far as I know, it is limited to Romance and Germanic.
Slavic certainly doesn't have it.
Latin conjugation doesn't look anything like this, but the old
Germanic languages such as Old English don't really have periphrastic
tenses either, so it's all a bit mysterious.
Portuguese is especially interesting, because although it has just one
verb "ter" for both functions, this word is the one that is cognate
with Spanish "tener" (to have in the sense of possess), not, as one
might have guessed, one that is cognate with "haber" (the auxiliary).
French has "avoir" (~ haber) with is used both as an auxiliary and
for possession, and "tenir" which has a basic meaning of "to hold".
In Portuguese, the cognate of "tenir" first usurped the possessive
meaning and eventually also replaced "avoir" in the auxiliary
position.
Similar, yes, but the verb that more closely corresponds with English
"to be" is "ser", which is not used as an auxiliary. "Estar" is, I
think, derived from Latin "sto", I stand, and is used in ways that show
some relationship to the idea of standing.
Yes, the Romance copula (excluding Romanian) has two forms, one
derived from "essere", one from "stare". French used to make this
distinction too, but sound changes actually managed to make the
forms of these verbs so similar to each other that they merged into
the modern "être", so French is now back to the same pattern as
English in this respect.
--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@xxxxxxxxxxxx
.
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