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Re: isolating is equivalent to inflected

From:Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Date:Monday, December 5, 2005, 20:27
Quoting caeruleancentaur <caeruleancentaur@...>:

> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, João Ricardo de Mendonça > <somnicorvus@G...> wrote: > > >So, for example, English "played" cannot be broken down into two > >words play + did. You can't have words between them (compare: "He > >will _probably_ play with us", but not * "He play probably did"). > >The fact that sometime in the past people actually spoke "He play > >did" instead of "He played" does not affect the way current English > >speakers analise their language. > > Are there some who believe that the past tense in English was formed > in this way, _verb_ + _did_? IIRC, a dental bound morpheme used to > indicate past time is as old as PIE. > > English: played, slept > Latin: laudatus
Well, _laudatus_ isn't strictly speaking a past tense form - it's a perfect participle. The imperfect is _laudabam_ and the perfect is _laudavi_, without a dental ending. Everything I've read would indicate that the dental morpheme in Germanic pasts and imperfects are indeed derived from a form of the auxillary "do". Andreas

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R A Brown <ray@...>PIE past time (was: isolating is equivalent to inflected)