Re: Infinitives

At 11:00 28/03/00 +0200, you wrote:
>
>In Vedic Sanskrit the formation that later became an infinitive was still a
>fully inflected noun, much like an _-ing_ noun (gerund) in English; cf.
>"they like dancing" and "they like to dance", which mean pretty much the
>same thing.  Even in Classical Sanskrit the non-inflecting infinitive is
>very seldom used, various deverbal noun formations being preferred
>instead.  But maybe that's too close to an ordinary infinitive for your
>taste...
>
I've read in my little booklet about Indo-European that in all IE
languages, infinitives evolve from declined forms of deverbal substantives
that become fossilized by usage. The cases used seem to vary, but with a
predominence of the spatial cases (locative, dative, ablative, etc...).
What struck me about that is the fact that adverbs come generally from the
same path of evolution.

                                                Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://rainbow.conlang.org
(ou : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepages/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html)