Re: latin verb examples and tense meanings

At 7:32 pm -0500 14/1/00, Nik Taylor wrote:
>Raymond Brown wrote:
>> And they do, even 'fui' (I have been) is perfectly behaved  :)
>
>Speaking of which verb, how did the _fui_ forms come to be preterites of
>both _ir_ and _ser_ in Spanish?
I guess for the same reason that, at least in Brit English, 'have been' is
not infrequently used to mean 'have gone',e.g.

Have you ever been to Paris?
Has John been to the store yet?
I've never been there in my life!
etc.

But in Spanish it must've been made easier in that forms derived from Latin
'iui' would simply look like endings with no verb stem.  For some reason,
tho the Romancelangs used 'uadere' to "fill in" some forms, none used it
for the past definite forms.  French could make use of 'aller' & 'Italian'
of 'andare' to form this tense; but in the Iberian peninsular they don't
seem to have use related forms to help supplete 'to go'.  So I guess _fui_
just sort of step in, as it's trying to in English.

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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