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I'm attempting to add Slovak to my list of badly-spoken languages and a
thought occurred to me - Are the auxiliary verbs (to be, to have) always
irregular in all languages or just the Indo-European ones or just the
ones I've come across?
Warp, what's the case in Finnish? Hildur, what's the case in Icelandic?
Anyone here speak any native American tongues?
John
--
"Eppur si muove" - Galileo Galilei
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> I'm attempting to add Slovak to my list of badly-spoken languages and a
> thought occurred to me - Are the auxiliary verbs (to be, to have) always
> irregular in all languages or just the Indo-European ones or just the
> ones I've come across?
It makes sense that they are, since they're usually the oldest and most
common verbs used. A bit like a Huffman coding for language :-)
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>> I'm attempting to add Slovak to my list of badly-spoken languages and a
>> thought occurred to me - Are the auxiliary verbs (to be, to have) always
>> irregular in all languages or just the Indo-European ones or just the
>> ones I've come across?
>
> It makes sense that they are, since they're usually the oldest and most
> common verbs used. A bit like a Huffman coding for language :-)
And I forgot to add, in Japanese they're regular.
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Doctor John <joh### [at] home com> wrote:
> Warp, what's the case in Finnish?
Hmm, verb inflections being "irregular" is not such a prominent
characteristic in Finnish that it is in other languages, but I suppose
the verb for "to be" (which happens to be the same as for "to have")
has its irregularities.
For example, the inflections for the present tense of "olla" (to be,
to have) and a similar verb "kuolla" (to die) are:
kuolen olen
kuolet olet
kuolee on
kuolemme olemme
kuolette olette
kuolevat ovat
The irregularity appears only in the third person of the present tense.
There's no irregularity eg. in the past tense:
kuolin olin
kuolit olit
kuoli oli
kuolimme olimme
kuolitte olitte
kuolivat olivat
The only other tense which I can think of with irregularities is the
potential tense (a slightly more rarely used tense, but not unusual,
especially with the verb "olla"; a bit rarer with other verbs):
kuollen lienen
kuollet lienet
kuollee lienee
kuollemme lienemme
kuollette lienette
kuollevat lienev?t
(The potential tense can be translated into English eg. as "he might die",
and "he might be", but as said, this tense is slightly archaic and its usage
is less common than a more explicit expression using "ehk?" ("maybe") and
the present tense (which also acts as future tense). The potential tense of
the verb "olla" is still relatively commonly used, though.)
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
> a more explicit expression using "ehk?" ("maybe")
It's even more amusing when the character encoding replaces finnish
characters with question marks. :-)
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
back to version 1.0."
"We've done that already. We call it 2.0."
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> > a more explicit expression using "ehk?" ("maybe")
> It's even more amusing when the character encoding replaces finnish
> characters with question marks. :-)
For some reason tin doesn't agree with KDE on character encodings, at
least in OpenSUSE (yes, I have tried to configure it inside and out,
to no avail). This causes quite a lot of problems with non-ascii
characters. I didn't have the problem when I used tin on a Sparc/Solaris
system.
Maybe I should finally dump tin.
--
- Warp
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Doctor John wrote:
> I'm attempting to add Slovak to my list of badly-spoken languages and a
> thought occurred to me - Are the auxiliary verbs (to be, to have) always
> irregular in all languages or just the Indo-European ones or just the
> ones I've come across?
> Warp, what's the case in Finnish? Hildur, what's the case in Icelandic?
> Anyone here speak any native American tongues?
One cause of irregularity, especially in some of the verbs nearer to the
heart of the language, is the replacement of one word by another
(whether from inside the language or without). One of English's more
famous irregular verbs ("to go") has for its simple past tense, the past
tense of an entirely different verb ("to wend"). The verb "to be" seems
to have suffered this same fate all over the western branch of the
Germanic language family, which means that it happened early in the
history of that language group, and appears to have been in progress
when the different languages became distinguished.
Both German and English appear to have borrowed nouns and verbs heavily
from other languages, and apparently continued to modify each such
borrowed word according to its source rules, rather than applying a
regular paradigm to all of them.
Regards,
John
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