Re: latin verb examples and tense meanings

On Mon, 17 Jan 2000 20:30:09 +0100 Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
writes:
> There is, of course, no precedent for conflated the two tenses in the
> Romance langs.  The imperfect has maintained itself as a separate
> tense.
> It is very like the Slav imperfective past in meaning and contrasts
> with
> the past definite (where it survives) or a perfect tense which
> corresponds
> to the perfective past in the Slav langs.  That is, the difference
> between
> the two tenses is very much one of aspect and, since I understood
> that
> aspect is fundamental to the verb system in the Semitic langs, I'm a
> bit
> surprised at this development in Jûdajca.  (Hope the u-cirmcumflex
> come out OK)
.

I took Spanish for 4 years, so originally i was looking forwards to
probably having a pretérito vs. imperfecto difference in the past tense,
but Aramaic and Hebrew have only 3 tenses - past, present, and future.  I
never really understood when people talked about Semitic tenses being
aspect-based rather then time-based, because i always thought of them as
tenses, although with the past tense being automatically perfect aspect.
Maybe that's a feature of Modern Israeli Hebrew, but from what i've seen,
once the present participle began to be used as a present tense sometime
around the transition from Biblical to Mishnaic Hebrew, the tenses seemed
to be used like they are today.  That's why i thought that the latin
perfect would be the default for the Ju:dajca past tense, and since it
doesn't have a conjugated passive, it would take the passive from the
other past tense.

> Not so - the -b- forms are used for -E:RE verbs also.  In early
> Latin they
> were also found with -IRE verbs; and such forms still occasionally
> appeared
> in verse in the Classical period.
.

i realized this after the email had already been sent.

> One possible future might be a development from the early Latin
> construction of 'supine + to go'.  In VL such forms would naturally
> have
> fused had they been used, thus 'tene:tum eo' ("I am going to hold",
> "I will hold") --> [te'ne:tjo:]
> What you'd have forms derived from the Classical (where ' shows
> elision of a syllable), e.g.
> tene:t'eo
> tene:t'i:s
> tene:t'it
> tene:t'i:mus
> tene:t'i:tis
> tene:t'eunt
> Of course that would mean regularizing the 3rd conj. supines -
> possible
> extenting the -u:tu(m) ending of VL.  But it'd give pretty
> distinctive forms  :)
.

Thanks for the idea....unfortunately Verbix doesn't seem to give the
supine forms of the verbs.  Hopefully tomorrow i'll get ahold of a latin
dictionary, but right now i don't understand all of it.  First of all,
what do you mean by having to regularize the 3rd conjugation's supines by
extending a VL ending -u:tu(m)?  And how would this work for passive
forms?  What's the difference between merging "to go" with the supine
form and merging it with the infinitive(s), like RL romancelangs do with
"have"?

> Hope this helps,
> Ray.
.

Yup, it does!  Especially all the verb forms right next to eachother.
Although it also makes everything even more complicated :-) .


-Stephen (Steg)
 "Vorks or miles, it will make no difference when the Stars come out." ~
_nightfall_