Re: Periphrastic tenses

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

> --- 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).
>

And in Nordwestblock, which is a more probable contact area, -k-
would not be exposed to Grimm and Verner, so with Germanic adopting
Nordwestblock loans, you'd expect a dialectal alternation -ing/-ink
(-ung/-unk). Which is the case.

Some have suggested that -i-/-u- alternation in Germanic suffixes is
not a reflex of ablaut e/zero, but an indication of loan.

Torsten