Re: [tied] Periphrastic tenses

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:

> On Mon, 08 Mar 2004 14:38:51 +0000, tgpedersen
> <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>
> > Trask argues that the progressive must be recent in Basque, thus

a

> >calque from Romance, since the gerund (imperfective participle)

which

> >is used in the locative case (<-n>) in the progressive tense
> >construction in Basque exists in several forms in the dialects,

using

> >different suffixes, the most common of which being <-te>, and
> >therefore the imperfective participle must be recent. Trask

mentions

> >himself that in the past the pure stem form of the verb might have
> >served as a participle.
>
> As a verbal noun in fact (the "radical"). Still so in
> Northern varieties.
>
> >If we assume that was the case, verbs the
> >stems of which ended in <-n> would have caused phonotactical

problems

> >(the <-n-> simply disappearing, according to the historical laws

of

> >Basque phology), when the locative suffix <-en> was added. Trask
> >describes a similar case where the perfective participle ending <-

i>

> >complicated the phonotactics of verbs having stems ending in <-n>

to

> >the point where it took a Trask to disentangle it (thus it

certainly

> >was not transparent to the average speaker). Under those
> >circumstances it is to be expected that the language would
> >disambiguate the situation by using a new suffix more resistent to
> >the prevailing phonological laws.
>
> There is no ambiguity. If I understand you correctly,
> you're saying that the old constructions used to be:

Might have been. Since Trask says "didn't exist" (an ancient
progressive tense in Baque, that is), I'm going for "might have
existed".

>
> etorri da "he has come" [he is come]
> *etorr-ko da "he will come" [he is of coming] (now:
> etorr-i-ko da)
> etorr-en da "he is coming, he comes" [he is in coming]
>
> If we take an intransitive n-verb, such as joan "to go":
>
> *joan-i da > joai/joan da [as disentangled by Trask]
> *joan-ko da > joan-go da
> *joan-en da > *joaen da > *joen da
>
> Most Basque dialects would have retained the distinction
> between joan and *joaen as joan ~ *joen. In any case, no
> such form is attested. What we have are the variants joaten
> ~ joaiten, joatzen, joaketan, joatan, joazaiten, etc.
>
> Note further that stem-final -n is not deleted before the
> locative ending -n: Irunen "In Irun", so the most likely
> thing would have been for *joan-en to be restored to
> *joanen. It's hard to say if that would indeed have been
> the case, because the radical is never declined, so we don't
> know if the radical of n-verbs ends in -nn (fortis /n/),
> like all nouns in -n (Irun < *Irunn, Irunen < *Irunn-en, so
> no loss of -nn-), or in simple -n. Trask's disentanglement
> of the n-verbs suggests that adjectival *-i was added to a
> form with simple *-n (joan-i > joai as in joai-ten), but
> that doesn't imply the same is true of the radical. A
> further complication is that the modern gerund forms -te(n),
> -tze(n) are added to a base without -n (but with a lost
> consonant): joa-te-n < *joaC-de-n, the same form that
> appears in the present tense of the strong verbs (noa "I go"
> < *na-da-oaC).
>

I can see that, but my point was: such a construction would have
caused problems, and something would have had to be done about it.
You have shown that in two similar cases two other strategies were
chosen to cope with it; it doesn't follow that in a hypothetical
third case, the strategy chosen would have similar to the two you
mention. It is not good for my proposal that no reflexes of it are
found, but at the end of the day that argument is ex nihilo; all
reflexes might have vanished, in several cases Trask cites as
evidence for his proposal hapaxes in 16th century writers. They might
as well have disappeared.

So, in all, I think I've succeeded in showing that it is not
impossible, as Trask states, that Basque might have had an old
periphrastic progressive. One should also notice that Basque in some
few verbs still has _inflected_ progressive tenses; in the IE
languages and Finnish I mention that have a "locativic" progressive
tense, it is periphrastic; so if one would have to argue whether one
side or the other was a donor (as a substrate?), that argument would
favor the Basque side. And another thing: if only some verbs of a
language have a certain inflectional (tense) category, it is not
uncommon for the language to extend that (tense) category to the rest
of the verbs by a periphrastic construction, cf. the category
of 'past' in Proto-Gmc in strong vs. weak verbs (the latter
originally constructed, according to 'the standard theory' using an
auxilliary verb). Therefore, some periphrastic progressive tense in
Basque might be as old as the beginning of the breakdown of the
verbal inflectional system.


Torsten