Re: Two part verbs (Why They Shouldn't Make Me Wait)

taliesin wrote:
> * Mia Soderquist said on 2006-12-07 02:40:43 +0100
> > While sitting in a waiting room recently, I scribbled out a system of
> > verbs
> > where every verb has two parts-- an auxiliary that carries
> > tense/aspect/mode/person/number, and then the part that carries the
> > content.
>
> Just like Basque!
My thought too! Also some conlangs IIRC -- David Bell's (Grey Wizard's)
ergative ..... (I forget the name, he hasn't been around for quite a while)
>
> > I thought about a series of auxiliaries that don't mean anything
> > on their own, but do contribute to the meaning of the verb phrase. For
> > instance, there would be an auxiliary form that is used with verbs about
> > "being", another for "doing",
> /../
>
> Basque have at least one for intransitive verbs (izan) which is like "to
> be", and one for (di)transitive verbs (ukan) which is like "to have". I
> don't know Basque well enough to know whether there are more.
And of course those auxiliaries do have intrinsic meaning. There is a third
construction, with the verb "to do" (egin IIRC, but you still need the aux.
to carry tense/person etc.) that is essentially a way of creating verbs from
some nouns-- one I remember is "sneeze + do (+ trans.aux.)" = 'to sneeze'--
so it's formally equiv. to NOUN=DO + to do ("I did/made a sneeze")

There's also a random handful of verbs that can be conjugated, i.e. without
the use of the aux. Now that Basque is reviving and being more standardized
and taught, I'm not sure whether they've survived.

> There are (were?) a guy here who seems to know a lot more about Basque
> than me though, and as usual I can't for the life of me remember his
> name ('cept it being one normally used by males of the species)...
>
I remember that too. Hopefully, he will speak up.

My acquaintance with Basque depends on a 1950's grammar by one Azkue (he was
not held in very high regard by L.Trask). Azkue was trying to present a
standardized language too, drawing from various dialects-- I don't think his
standard is the one used today, however.  I did a course paper once, trying
to figure out if there was any regularity in the conjugation of the
auxiliaries-- it was very hard to see much, at least in Azkue's forms.
:-((((  One modern on-line course I've looked at suggests that there is
quite a bit of regularity, identifiable morphemes etc. etc. but I'm not
convinced-- it's often the case that in, say, a 5-phoneme form, every
phoneme is also a morpheme. Hmmmm.

Trask's "History of Basque" btw is required reading!!!! Absolutely
fascinating.

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