Re: Some info on Ulm on the web

En réponse à Arthaey Angosii <arthaey@...>:

>
> The auxilary separate from the main verb seems unusual to me.
> Knowledgeable folk out there, help me out:  does it seem strange to me
> just
> because it's termed an auxilary "verb" and therefore I want it to be
> associated with the verb itself?  I'm thinking that perhaps this is just
> an
> Englishism on my part, and that if the auxilary verb were instead called
> a
> mood marker...
>
Well, even in English the auxiliary gets easily separated from the main verb.
Just try to ask an question ;)) .

As for whether the auxiliary can be separated from the verb, it is indeed
language-dependent but very frequent. French does it with small objects: "je
n'ai rien vu": I didn't see anything, literally "I not have nothing seen").
Germanic languages like Dutch and German do it constantly since in those
languages, in a principal clause, the conjugated verb *must* be at the second
place in the sentence while a non-finite form (participle or infinitive) must
always be put at the end of the sentence (for what I know, the rule is stronger
in Standard German than in Standard Dutch). So for instance a sentence like "Ik
heb deze bloemen voor haar gekocht": "I have these flowers for her bought" is a
perfectly normal word order, even in the spoken language (I am often surprised
how they can keep track of things with such a word order. But then it's nothing
compared to true SOV languages like Japanese ;))) ). And of course, there are
VSO languages like Irish Gaelic and Arabic which, when they have a construction
with an auxiliary verb, generally put the auxiliary first and the main verb
after the subject, leading to a construction Aux-Subj-Verb-Obj.

So in short, yes, it's an Englishism of your part to consider that it's strange
for an auxiliary to be separated from the main verb :)) .

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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