Re: Genitive relationships (WAS: Construct States)

Raymond A. Brown wrote:

> At 7:13 pm -0800 9/3/99, Sally Caves wrote:
> >Raymond A. Brown wrote:
> >
> >>
> >>
> >> Nor did English use the present participle!
> >
> >Sure it did!  Ic waes sprecende.   At least Bede's
> >translators so use it.
>
> OK.
>
> >> The older form was: "I am a-pulling"  = *I am on pulling.  The prefixed a-
> >> is a watered down form of 'on'.
> >
> >Yes, but did the on precede the inflected infinitive or the present
> >participle?
> >I think the latter.  Ic waes on sprecende.  Older than what?
>
> *ic waes on sprecende - doesn't seem to make much sense to me.
Why not?  Sprecend readily takes conjugated forms.  Often they are treatedlike
adjectives, but they acquire substantive meaning, as in _reordberend_,
"speech-bearing one."  I have no problem seeing the pres.part. as the precursor
to the MnE "gerund," which is not quite the same as an infinitive.  The inflected
infinitive,
and I can go to the concordance to check this, is usually used only after _to_.
This has given us our present use of the infinitive with a "to" in front of it.
I explain to my students that this is not the basic infinitive.  The basic
infinitive
is found in such constructions as "I can go, I must go, He had me go home."
Occasionally we use the infinitive gerundively, as in "To know him is to love
him," but more often we say "Loving someone is more important that earning
money."

My Mitchell and Robinson gives an account of the inflected infinitive, and
never mentions any other preposition, and in my reading of this language
I've found no instances of _on sprecanne_ or any such construction.
And it doesn't make sense to ME for the reasons I give below about the
gerund.

> I've always understood it was neither of them but that it was the _gerund_
> which ended in -ing & is cognate with the Modern German ending -ung.
Sprecende furnished the form for what we know of as the gerund.Isn't it -end that
is cognate with MnG -ung?  In Middle English you have a
wide variety of this -end ending: -and, -ung, -yng... all over England

> That would surely account for the use of 'of' before the direct object.
If you can accept that our gerund is derived from the present participleand not
the infinitive, then your questions will be answered.   Ditto for
below.

> I've always understood that the modern 'I was going...' derived from the
> older and now largely obsolete 'I was a-going...' (I believe such forms
> still survive in some parts of the US - tho maybe that is another Brit.
> myth :)
No, they do.

Sally Caves
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/verbs.html
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/recipes.html

Tenuo al aittear; kraiko al ofykya, edrime al imuif.
Winter is my name, cessation my business, sleep my gift.
(An old Caves poem).