Don Blaheta wrote:
>
> Quoth Christophe Grandsire:
> >   I think so, even if I can't even remember the present tense of IRE :( .
>
> Well, I seem to recall that the IRE forms were used in certain tenses
> (future, maybe?) while VADERE was used in others, including present; my
> memory might just be inventing that, though.
>

        I'm not sure. The only form I'm sure is 'eo' for "I go". Definitely
from IRE, not VADERE.

> > It is the same in Italian, were "to go" is 'andare' (but here, even the
> > future tense is taken from 'andare', the use of the forms from IRE has
> > almost disappeared).
>
> Anything from VADERE?
>

        Yes, the present tense must be something like:
vado
vai
va
andamo
andate
andano

        Or something like that. Where did I heard the form 'andiamo'? :)

> > In Spanish however, "to go" is 'ir' and has forms coming from *vadere*
> > and IRE only. In that respect, it is the nearest to Latin.
>
> Thus "no va" = "doesn't go". :)
>

        Yes :)

> >         Definitely they will become simple prefixes. What you consider as
> > stilted is nearly the rule in Colloquial French nowadays. I even think
> > that we are in front of a seperation of Spoken French into two language
> > registers: a formal one, using the "short forms" ("je pense...", "Marie
> > a dit"), and a familiar one using the subject pronouns as clitics ("moi,
> > je pense..." -pronounced /mwa Sp'a~s/-, "Marie, elle a dit..." -I must
> > say that I find this form still awkward with compound tenses. But I'm
> > rather conservative as for French despite my young age :) -).
>
> I wonder in what way (if at all) this development is related to the loss
> of "ne" in spoken French; could it be that as the pronouns made their
> way into conjugations on the verb, the human brain resisted having a
> third paradigm axis for negation?
>

        I think that's only because 'ne' is unstressed, and thus was often
reduced to /n/, that easily disappears in fast speech, (even in not that
fast speech, "je ne sais pas" is pronounced /Z@ns'Ep'a/, which easily
gives way to /S'Ep'a/ that we often find in children's mouths and write
also "chais pas" :) ) and because we have a split negation with a
stressed part 'pas' that is more easily heard. So losing 'ne' wasn't
such a loss. :)

> > > -=-Don [log in to unmask]<http://www.cs.brown.edu/~dpb/>-=-
> > > If God had meant for us to be naked, we would have been born that way.
> >
> >         Who said that? That's a funny one :)
>
> Dunno, it's just in my .sig file.  Usually I try to attribute my quotes,
> but some of them just come to me without an author. :)
>
> --
> -=-Don [log in to unmask]<http://www.cs.brown.edu/~dpb/>-=-
> Why buy a product that it takes 2000 flushes to get rid of?

--
        Christophe Grandsire

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