Re: [tied] Periphrastic tenses

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

> One should also notice that Basque in some
> > >few verbs still has _inflected_ progressive tenses;
> >
> > That's because the periphrastic form is no longer truly a
> > progressive:
> >
> > I go = joaten naiz
> > I went = joan nintzen
> > I'm going = noa
> > I was going = nindoan
> >
> > The specialization of the synthetic forms as progressives
> > (in the few verbs that still have them) is surprising. One
> > would have expected the opposite to have happened.
> >
>
> In other words a situation where those synthetic forms _originally_
> were progressives would be less surprising, and, if Vennemann is
> right about his West European Vasconic substrate, it might be
> imagined to have been the original motherlode of progressive tenses.
>

It occurred that if there was once a Vasconic language family in
western Europe, then one of the members of it might have formed a
gerund, or verbal noun, in *-en-ko.

If a speaker of such a language wanted to speak a (late) IE language,
he might want to use a construction he was used to, instead of this
confusing VO/accusative stuff he might have used *-en-ko too. In
time, in proto-Germanic, this became *-inga, which is the suffix of
the verbal noun, later gerund (in English).

Torsten