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Re: Tentative Judajca =A= Conjugations

From:Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Wednesday, March 28, 2001, 19:37
At 2:33 pm -0500 27/3/01, Steg Belsky wrote:
>On Tue, 27 Mar 2001 19:05:35 +0000 Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...> >writes: >> So Latin h-, which was universally lost elsewhere, gets preserved or >> restored? The loss in the spoken language seems to have happened >> before >> the end of the BCE era. I assume the preservation or restoration of >> /h/ must be due to the influence of Aramaic and/or Hebrew. >- > >Yup... it'll probably be a good source of hypercorrectafied words, too. > >> >Almost... it's infinitive + i:re. > >> Instead of the supine + ire found in written Latin? >- > >How does that work? From putting together the definition of "supine" in >my English dictionary and the verb charts in my Latin-English dictionary, >it looks like the supine means "(having been) verbed"...
No, no. The supine has nothing to do with the passive. It is the fossilized case forms of a 4th declension verbal noun. It existed in two forms, an accusative used with verbs of motion to indicate purpose, e.g. comissatum ibo [PLAUTUS] = I'll be going to make merry... abiit ambulatum [PLAUTUS] = he went away to take a walk coctum ego, non uapulatum, dudum conductus fui [PLAUTUS] - I was brought here quite recently to cook, not to be beaten. it petitum.....gratiam [PLUTUS] = he is going to seek....a favor The last example shows how easily _ire_ + supine slipped into being a periphrastic future. By Cicero's time, this construction had become regarded as archaic and survived only in set phrases, e.g. cubitum eo = I am going to lie down, i.e. I am going to bed. It could be used to form a periphrastic future passive, e.g. urbem captum itur = on va prendre la ville (i.e. the city will be taken). [Note: _captum_ is the supine; it cannot agree with _urbem_ since the latter is feminine] That is the origin of the so-called "future infinitive passive": dixit urbem captum iri = il a dit qu'on allait prendre la ville (i.e. he said the city would be taken). And a a form ending in -u which is probably an old ablative, tho some argue that it was a dative, which modifies an adjective thus: mirabile dictu [VERGIL] = wonderful to relate ------------------------------------------------------------------ At 3:07 pm -0800 27/3/01, jesse stephen bangs wrote: [snip]
> >Actually, the Romance forms came from infinitive + habe:re, using the >reduced forms of habe:re that Vulgar Latin had.
I think most of us know that, at least as far the modern Western Romancelangs are concerned, for as Nik said: ...at 6:14 pm -0500 27/3/01, Nik Taylor wrote:
>jesse stephen bangs wrote: >> Actually, the Romance forms came from infinitive + habe:re > >Most did, but not all. Sardinian uses forms of the auxiliary _debbo_ (I >think that's the form), derived from Latin _debere_ (ought).
IIRC _debere_ had wider use in early Romance.
>And as you >also pointed out, Romanian's another exception.
Yes, that went for *volére (Classical: uelle). All three constructions - facere volo, facere debeo, facere habeo - appear to have been current in Vulgar Latin as periphrases for the dead synthetic future of the Classical language. But one thing, surely, is certain: namely that whatever Judajca is, it is not a western Romance lang. It retains Latin /h/ and synthetic passive tenses, both features which no modern Romance language retains! Steg had said that the Judajca future was derived from the Latin infinitive + ire, i.e. <-- *facere eo. Such forms are not found in early or Classical Latin and, indeed, the infinitive could not be thus used. However, under Greek influence, the infinitive is occasionally found in Classical verse to show purpose with verbs of motion, and this usage appears in prose as well in Late Latin. In view of the heavy influence of the Greek Koine in the Levant, such usage could well have become common in proto-Judaica. However, in view of Judajca's preservation of certain archaic features, lost elsewhere, I was merely pointing out to Steg another way - certainly common in early Latin, if Plautus is anything to go by - to express the future periphrastically by using _ire_ which might be of interest to him. Ray. ========================================= A mind which thinks at its own expense will always interfere with language. [J.G. Hamann 1760] =========================================