Re: Periphrastic tenses

>
>
> According to Trask "The History of Basque" that language has
> periphastic constructions both for the past ('be'/'have' plus
> participle in the style of Germanic and Romance) and for

progressive

> tenses (copula plus a particple in a locative construction, in the
> style of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Gaelic, Dutch,

Danish

> (but not Swedish or Norwegian afaIk) and Finnish; possibly (North?)
> German <er war beim Schreiben> or, as I think I've heard, <... am
> Schreiben>, but it's not commonly used).
>

I've just learned from a side remark in an article about something
else, that the <... am Schreiben> progressive tense construction
is "Rhenish and Western" in German, which matches nicely with a
Nordwestblock origin.

Torsten