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Preverbal particles (was: Re: R: Italian Particles)

From:Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Saturday, April 22, 2000, 15:52
At 3:37 pm -0600 21/4/00, Aidan Grey wrote:
>Raymond Brown wrote: > >> At 11:34 am +0100 21/4/00, yl-ruil wrote: >> >Raymond Brown wrote: >> [...] >> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------ >> >> At 9:13 pm +0100 16/4/00, yl-ruil wrote: >> >> >Out of interest, >> >> >in the Celtic languages virtually all verbs are prefixed by a particle >> >but >> >> >> >> 'virtually all' seems a bit of a hyperbole IMHO. > > Seems perfectly accurate to me.
Depends, it seems, by what one means by 'virtually all'. I guess in this day & age when 'virtual reality' means that it's not real, the phrase is a tad ambiguous.
>Irish and Scots Gaelic do this,
Yes - but unless the books I have are hopelessly misinformed (a possibility, I guess), I have not the slightest difficulty in finding examples of verbs without prefixed particles. The tendency in all the modern Celtic-langs is surely to use periphrastic forms using the verb 'to be'; according to my sources, which may be wrong, neither the Irish 'ta' nor Scots Gaelic 'tha' have prefixes; nor do I see them before synthetic present tenses.
>Old irish >especially so (hence the larger number of irish verbs that begin in t-, >thanks to >the preverb do-).
A preverb denoting past time, isn't it? I've already agreed with yl-ruil that there's certainly a _tendency_ towards use of preverbal particles; to me 'virtually all' seems a bit of a hyperbolic way to describe this, obviously others disagree. And, as I understand it, both he & I are agreed that the so-called "Italian particles" are a different phenomenon from this Celtic one. I misunderstood the point he was making because the subject title hadn't been changed as the thread changed - I've been as guilty as anyone on this - and I've acknowledged it. Ray. Can't we let the matter rest. ========================================= A mind which thinks at its own expense will always interfere with language. [J.G. Hamann 1760] =========================================