Re: CHAT: R: Italian Particles

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.
>
>Erm, Cornish prefixes a particle to all verbs except affirmative answers: "a
>welough-why an chy? gwelaf" "do you see the house? I see". Same in Welsh and
>(to some extent) Breton.
Literary Welsh, yes - but no longer in spoken Welsh, tho the soft mutation
remains.

As for Cornish, it depends what variety you take, I think.  Your example
looks like Unified Cornish (tho I guess it may be Kemmyn) - but I'm not
sure what Cornuack (spelling??) does.

As I said, in Welsh the _affirmative_ does have prefixes in the spoken
language ('fe' in the south; 'mi' in the north) in the synthetic tenses,
tho the literary language has no particle.

[....]
>
>Same happens in Cornish for the periphrastic tenses: "theram ow tysky
>Kembrek", from "yth-eram ow tysky Kembrek", equivalent to the Welsh "rydyw
>i'n dysgu Cymraeg", from "yr ydyw fi'n dysgu Cymraeg".
Ah - I guess the first Cornish example is 'modern Cornish'  :)

[....]
>
>> But in any case, none of these proclitics are _subject_ proclitics as in
>> Friulan & the GalloItalic (or is it ItaloGallic ?) dialects.  Maybe,
>> however, this wasn't implied.
>
>'Twasn't ;)
Fair enough - I agree there is a tendency towards usage of procltic
particles in the Brittonic langs - but we seem agreed that it's not the
same phenomenon as the use of subject proclitics in the GalloItalic
dialects.

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
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