Re: About Romance natlangs and conlangs (Re: ) (LONG)

At 6:56 pm -0500 20/11/99, Nik Taylor wrote:
>FFlores wrote:
>> No kidding! You're right! I can't find any other one!
>> I guess it must be a late development. IIRC the imperfect
>> ending was a clitic at some point in time...
>
>Well, there's also _ver_ (but that was once _veer_).  But, the imperfect
>goes straight back to the Latin Imperfect
.....which is pretty early in Romance terms :)

But then the Latin imperfect was boringly regular - the major exceptions
being 'esse' (to be) & 'posse' (to be able).  But even with these, once you
know "I was" is 'eram' & "I could" is 'poteram' all the other forms can be
regularly derived.

The Latin endings -bam, -bas, -bat etc. are derived from an older impefect
of 'to be' formed on the PIE *bh- stem which got 'glued on' enclitically
(except, of course, with the two verbs above).  The PIE *bh- would become
f- if initial in Latin, so 'fui', 'fuisti', etc of the perfect, but would
regularly develop to -b- intervocalically.

What verb-base these enclitics are attached to is less clear.  I have seem
it stated that, e.g. mittebam <-- *mittens-bam (present participle: I-was
sending).  Others argue, I think more credibly, that it was some case form
of a verbal noun, thus: cf. "I-was a-sending" (<-- I was on sending) which
survived in some Brit.English dialects till fairly recently & still
survives, I believe, in some US dialects.

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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