Re: Welsh - Verb-Nouns

Thomas Leigh wrote:

>Christopher Bates wrote:
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>>It is true that welsh has more than one true verb, but not thousands.
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>No, Welsh does indeed have thousands of verbs, just like every European
>language (well, every one I've ever seen, anyway). And they can and do
>inflect for tense, person, and number.
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>>The main one of course is the various forms of bod...
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>I'm not sure what you mean by "the main one". The verb bod does, of course,
>appear very frequently, since it is used as an auxilliary.
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>>the "verb-nouns" I would not count as true verbs... although that's just
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>my opinion. :)
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>Why not? They're a verbal form just like any other. That's like saying that
>English verb forms ending in -ing aren't true verbs. Or that, say,
>infinitives in a Romance language aren't true verbs.
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>>The reason is that all the verb-nouns are used in conjunction with another
>>verb
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>Well, a verbal noun is a form which means, basically "the act of ...ing". So
>yes, they will usually appear either with the verb "to be" as an auxilliary
>(i.e. "I am/was/will be/etc. [engaged in the act of] doing XYZ", just like
>English) or as the subject or object of a sentence. But I fail to see how
>this makes them not "true verbs".
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>>(and must be marked when they are fulfilling the role of a verb)
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Perhaps I have taken it wrong since I learned some basic welsh a long
time ago, but is it not true that when you say something like... "dw i'n
dysgu" where verb-nouns are used in conjuction with bod, you need a
marker like yn or wedi before the verb-noun. When a verb noun is used
without a form of bod (or not used as an auxilliary to another verb) ,
then you need a marker like mi or fe usually. As for your examples of
infinitives and english's -ing ending, I would not count them as verbs
no. The infinitives are noun forms from verb stems, and english's -ing
is used to form an adjective from the verb.
On another matter that I was just thinking about... a lot of languages
require another verb for certain tenses, but english require we use
another verb when we wise to negate. Why is this? For instance, in
french you can say "Je ne comprends pas" (I think I spelled it right).
There ne... pas negates the verb without use of another verb as well.
But in english we say "I do not understand". Why do we need the do?
Surely we could do what every other european language seems to and say
something like "I not understand" or "I understand not".
 But anyway... this is me being confused lol.

Chris B.