Re: USAGE English 'thou' (was: Proto-Romance)

Yes, it's something like that. I quite admit that
there must be some historical explanation, but to me
it looks very strange to have the pronoun included
between the stem and the tense+person. In French you
say "je LE verrai", in English "I shall see HIM", so
the pronoun is separated and placed, either before,
either after the verbal form, but not in the middle of
it ! (the same for many other European languages; and
the history of French future seems to me the same as
in Spanish or Portuguese, AFAIK).

So it looks a little like Georgian or Basque, more
than Indo-European. This is one of the features that
stroke and puzzled me when I started learning a little
Portuguese. It just looks uncommon. (Still, one must
notice that Portuguese uses a "-" inside such forms,
so it's not completely integrated).

--- Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...> wrote:
>
> > and the inclusion of the object pronoun
> > in the verbal form (have to find examples again)
>
> Forms like vêlo-ei (I will see him/it, lit.
> see-him-I.will), if I
> remember the orthography right.  That part, at
> least, is an archaism.
> Old Spanish also used forms like _ver-lo-hé_ (not
> sure if that's how it
> would've been spelled).  It's quite logical, really,
> since the future
> tense is historically derived from the infinitive
> plus inflections of
> _haber_, and object pronouns are generaly suffixed
> to infinitives in
> many Romance languages, including Spanish and
Portuguese.


=====
Philippe Caquant

"High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs)

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