Re: Verbal noun, verbnoun, deverbal noun, gerund, infinitive

On 10/24/07, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
> The terms 'infinitive' and 'gerund', however, are rather more language
> specific - tho IMO this should not be so much a question of a speaker's
> L1 as of the language one is speaking about. Although infinitives are
> common, not all languages have them, nor do they behave exactly the same
> in all languages.
That reminds me of the time I learned that Modern Greek has infinitives.

Turned out that (as you said) they behave differently from what I was
expecting an infinitive to do (or from what those forms called
"infinitives" in Ancient Greek did).

(They're used to form the perfect, btw, where English - for example -
would use a past participle. For example, "I have never eaten fish" =
"Δεν έχω ποτέ φάει ψάρι", with φάει "eaten"(?) being the
απαρέμφατο or
infinitive of τρώω "eat". Morphologically, they look the same as the
third person singular "aorist subjunctive" -- the form used, for
example, after the future marker θα in perfective-aspect phrases --,
though I'm told that it derives from the AG infinitive in -ειν.)

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>