Re: CHAT: Worse Greek 102 (was: Bad Latin 101)

> Date:         Mon, 5 Feb 2001 20:53:31 -0000
> From: Lars Henrik Mathiesen <thorinn@...>
> But how deep should one dig for Latinis originales to inflectere, when
> the English forma isn't realiter the same as any Latina one anyway?
By the way, this reminds me of something that Danish does (possibly
after a German pattern):

Latin 2nd/3rd conjunction infinitives are perfectly acceptable as
Danish infinitives, where everything except the final -e is taken as
the stem of a weak verb. So "it functions" is "det fungerer" in
Danish.

The Latin 1st and 4th conjunctions get folded in, with the stem vowel
changed to <e>, and deponents get a fake active infinitive.

And of course there's a totally regular (passive) past participle
formed for all these words, making for a sometimes fairly obscure
connection with the English or Romance forms:

  Danish           English

  funderet         founded
  fungeret         functioned
  genereret        generated
  grasseret        run wild
  interveneret     intervened
  regeret          reigned

However, there's also a pattern whereby -ere can be tacked onto
Latin-sounding nouns to form a verb --- so we get 'funktionere'
instead of 'fungere' in illiterate computer ads. (Late Latin may have
had functionare too, there were lots of secondary 1st conj. verbs).

And on the other hand, there are cases where the traditional method
breaks down because the form would be too strange. In principle, the
Latinate form corresponding to English 'restricted' should be
'restringeret' in Danish, but noone would recognize that.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)