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From: deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: Progressive tenses (was: language relatedness ...)
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Date: Fri, 31 Jan 1997 00:26:49 GMT
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In article <E4uCvo.5Ao@nonexistent.com>, John Cowan  <cowan@ccil.org> wrote:
>Daniel von Brighoff wrote:
>
>> >English certainly inherits its lexicon
>> >from several sources, and may have acquired some of its grammar from
>> >Celtic (the periphrastic tenses are uncannily close to those in Welsh,
>> >in particular the "progressive" tense, which has no counterpart in
>> >German nor in French).
>> 
>> But does in Castilian and Catalan, which clearly must have acquired it
>> from--well, um, Celtiberian?  I've never before encountred the theory that
>> the Celtic verbal system influenced the English one.  In fact, according
>> to my fragmentary recollection of Welsh linguistic history, the
>> "progressive" shows up first in English.  May I ask for references?
>
>I have no references on tap either, but I have been told that
>Irish agrees with Welsh here, suggesting that if borrowing was
>involved, it was in the direction Welsh -> English.

And not English -> Welsh, Irish?  Why?  I don't know at what point the
"progressive tenses" appear in Welsh and Irish ("periphrasic" would be
more accurate since they don't actually have a progressive sense.  In
Welsh, for instance, the forms of bod + yn + [verbal noun ](e.g. Mae Huw
yn ysgrifennu llythyr "Hugh writes/is writing a letter") express the
simple present and the literary simple present (e.g. Ysgrifennith Huw
llythyr "Huw will/is going to write a letter") actually has future
meaning), but they certainly aren't a feature of proto-Celtic.  

Similarly, both Welsh and Gaelic have morphological alternation of initial
consonants (so-called "mutation"), but there's no evidence that this was a
feature of proto-Celtic either.  And virtually all Western European
languages have a periphrasic perfect (Eng. have + [past participle], Fr.
avoir + [p.p.], Port. ter + [p.p.]), but that doesn't mean that this was a
feature of PIE.  Indeed, it's not even a regular feature of Vulgar Latin.

I'm not claiming to know exactly what the relationships are between these
languages that explain the parallel evolution of periphrasic tenses, but I
am very wary of leaping to any conclusions based on surface similarities.

-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
