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:
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).
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...