a-speaking (was : Genitive relationships (WAS: Construct States))

At 10:46 am -0800 10/3/99, Sally Caves wrote:
>Raymond A. Brown wrote:
......
>> >Yes, but did the on precede the inflected infinitive or the present
>> >participle?
>> >I think the latter.  Ic waes on sprecende.  Older than what?
>>
>> *ic waes on sprecende - doesn't seem to make much sense to me.
>
>Why not?
I thought I'd deleted that before mailing  :=(

Oh well, it's true, anyway.
In Latin & Greek participles are essentially _adjectival_ which though,
like finite verbs, they can govern direct & indirect objects.  If used
substantivally as in the above it would certainly mean "a speaking person",
"a speaker" - therefore, it seemed to me that 'ic waes on sprecende' would
mean "I was on a speaker" (being carried - or is aggressive or erotic, or
what?)!

>Sprecend readily takes conjugated forms.
Conjugated?

>Often they are treatedlike
>adjectives, but they acquire substantive meaning, as in _reordberend_,
>"speech-bearing one."
Which is exactly what I thought, see above.  But I intended to delete the
response as it occurred to me that maybe things were a bit different in
O.E. from Latin & Greek in this respect.  From what you say, it seems that
they are not.  So what can 'ic waes on sprecende' mean except: "I was on a
speaker"??

<sigh - I'm genuinely puzzled - *not* trying to be clever or nit pick, but
really trying to understand how 'ic waes on sprecende' was supposed to work>

>I have no problem seeing the pres.part. as the precursor
>to the MnE "gerund," which is not quite the same as an infinitive.  The
>inflected
>infinitive,
What is the difference?

In Latin the gerund takes the place of the infinitive if you want it to be
governed by a preposition or to be in any case other than the nom. or acc.

>and I can go to the concordance to check this, is usually used only after
>_to_.
No need - I know that.

>This has given us our present use of the infinitive with a "to" in front
>of it.
>I explain to my students that this is not the basic infinitive.  The basic
>infinitive
>is found in such constructions as "I can go, I must go, He had me go home."
>Occasionally we use the infinitive gerundively, as in "To know him is to love
>him,"
Why is that 'gerundively'?  Latin and all the Romance languages use
infinitive in this construction, so indeed do very many other languages.

>but more often we say "Loving someone is more important that earning
>money."
Yep - what I've always understood as gerunds.

>My Mitchell and Robinson gives an account of the inflected infinitive, and
>never mentions any other preposition, and in my reading of this language
>I've found no instances of _on sprecanne_ or any such construction.
>And it doesn't make sense to ME for the reasons I give below about the
>gerund.
But I've never suggested that *on sprecanne ever occurred!  AFAIK the OE
infinitive in -nne was always preceeded by 'to'.  Indeed, I agree with you
on that.

>> I've always understood it was neither of them but that it was the _gerund_
>> which ended in -ing & is cognate with the Modern German ending -ung.
>
>Sprecende furnished the form for what we know of as the gerund.Isn't it
>-end that
>is cognate with MnG -ung?
Not in my understanding of things.  I've always understood that -end was
cognate with:
MnG -end
Dutch -end(e)
Norw. -ende (same or similar in the other Scandinavian langs.)
i.e. the present participle, cognate with Latin -(e)nt-, Greek -nt- etc.
from PIE *-nt-  .

Somewhen in my teens I read that English -ING was cognate with Scandinavian
-ING, Dutch -ING and MnG -UNG, e.g. warning, varning, waarschuwing, Warnung.

Now when things I've thought true for more over 40 years are suddenly
challenged you must forgive me if I have a problem getting my head around
this.

>In Middle English you have a
>wide variety of this -end ending: -and, -ung, -yng... all over England
Yep - but isn't this akin the similar phenomenon in France where forms
derived from the Latin _3rd_ decl. present participles in -ant-, -(i)ent-
were becoming confused with forms derived from the _2nd_ decl. gerund in
-and-, -(i)end-, i.e. phonetic attrition which was making them all sound
rather like /a~t/ (the final /t/ has, of course, since become silent) ?

Sometime in English the final -d in unstressed polysyllabics fell silent
and final /N/ in unstressed polysyllabics became /n/ - a pronunciation
which still survives in Brit. aristrocratic speech & has not entirely
disappeared from colloquial speech in all areas.  The bourgeousie restored
/N/ in this position and in some Brit. dialects where /N/ had not become
phonemic, this has led to the pronunciations [INg] or [INk] for present
participles/gerunds and words like 'something', 'anything'.

I'm sorry - but all the Middle English spellings suggest to me is that the
-ing and -end(e) forms were, like the -a/ent and -a/end forms in France,
becoming confused through phonetic attrition.  Possibly in the Middle
English melange survivals of the OE -n(ne) infinitives had been thrown in
as well in some places!

>> That would surely account for the use of 'of' before the direct object.
>
>If you can accept that our gerund is derived from the present
>participleand not
>the infinitive, then your questions will be answered.   Ditto for
>below.
I certainly do *not* believe nor have _ever_ thought the Gerund was derived
from the infinitive - yes, I accept that.  But, I regret, that I cannot
lightly abandon a belief of over 40 years and somehow dissociate the ending
-ing from the -ing, -ung of the other Germanic languages and see it derive
from -end.

-------------------------------------------------------------
And at 6:36 pm +0100 10/3/99, Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
.........
>I read somewhere that the MnE verb form in -ing conflates _three_
>derived nominals, which are still kept apart in other Germanic
>languages, e.g., MnG and Danish. In the latter, we have (as a slightly
>contrived example)
>
>        (at ride -- to ride a horse)
>        riden    -- some riding around, as an event that happens
>        ridning  -- riding in general, e.g., as a hobby
>        ridende  -- present participle, as in "riding policeman"
>
>The first of these is obsolescent in Danish, but not in German AFAIK.
Thanks for the confirmation of -en.  I've always understood it was a
conflation of the latter two; but that it's a conflation of all three seems
to me even more likely and would account for the ready passage of -ing from
denoting a noun derived from a verb to the actual verbal noun or gerund.

Ray.