USAGE: a+participle [was Re: Chat: Linux etc.]

Quoting Tim May <butsuri@...>:

> Roberto Suarez Soto writes:
>  >
>  >         Times are a'changing, they say :-) BTW (and to save the
>  > offtopic), that "a+<verb in gerund>" thing that I've seen many times in
>  > english is something that I don't understand :-m Where does it come
>  > from?
IIRC, it comes from "on" + participle.  In some dialects, this
grammaticalized as a marker of imperfectivity, and the nasal
was lost, and the vowel reduced to schwa.  (Don't know when
the nasal was lost; was it the same time that the nasals were
lost in "tooth" and "kid"?)

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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