Re: USAGE: "Laughingly":What part of speech is it?

On Sun, 4 Oct 1998, R. Skrintha wrote:

> The infinitive in German treated as a gerund takes on the neuter gender
> and the word order of its complements is reversed with respect to the
> that of infinitival construction (which in turn is reversed wrt the
> English word order!). Thus:
>=20
>         * auf Hans warten =3D to wait for John
>         * das Warten auf Hans =3D waiting for John
>         * die Zeitdauer meines Wartens auf Hans =3D the duration of my
>                                                   waiting for John
>=20
>=20
> As in English, there are no word-order gymnastics in the Scandinavian
> langs :). Thus: "att arbeta med deg"/'working with you', "att leva i
> Sjaelland"/'living in Zealand', etc. However, I do not know whether the
> infinitival construction as a gerund can be used also in cases other th=
an
> nominative and accusative.
Hm, the "-en" gerund exists, although it is a bit archaic in Norwegian.
However, it is not identical to the infinitive, which ends in "-e".

The infinitive itself is used in a similar way with "=E5" in front (same =
as
Swedish "att", English "to".)  It is used as a gerundive after
prepositions as well, in fact I wouldn't call the "-(n)ing" forms
gerundives at all in Norwegian, "-(n)ing" is an ordinary noun building
suffix here and the result cannot take objects and adverbs like in
English.

Greetings,
=D8rjan.

--=20
'What Einstein called "the happiest thought of my life" was his
realization that gravity and acceleration are both made of orange
Jello.'  - from a non-crackpot sci.physics.relativity posting