Re: Question about supines, gerunds, and the like

On 15 May 2004 Garth Wallace <gwalla@D...> wrote:

> Going by the examples in the Wikipedia article on Slovene grammar,
> it seems to express purpose there. But that doesn't seem to be what
> it does in Swedish, according to Andreas.
  In Slavistic, supine is a subtype of the infinitive used to
express purpose, e.g. Old Church Slavonic "pride zhena ot6
Samariye~ *pochre^t6* vody" (John 4:7) 'There came a woman of
Samaria *to draw* water'. [e~ = nasalized e, e^ = yat, 6 = back
yer]. That is, similar to the Latine usage of accusative supine. In
present Slavic languages, only Slovene has supine: it is used after
motion verbs in place of infinitive. In the other Slavic languages
supine was replaced by infinitive.

  Slavic supine is the accusative of a verbal noun (cognate of
Latin perfect participle, cf. Lat. datum ~ Sl. sup. dat6) and
infinitive is the dative of the same verbal noun (Sl. inf. dati).

  There're more infinitives in the majority of the Finno-Ugric
languages, too. None of them are called supine, however, those
ending in *-ma/mä have similar usage.

  IMHO, supine can have two definitions: (1) it's a separate, final
infinitive (i.e. denoting puspose); (2) it's an infinitive that can
be inflected (cf. it has accusative and ablative in Latine).
Swedish supine is an exeption that "stands beside the rule".