Re: Past Tenses in Western Europe


"*** T. Winter" <***.Winter@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:IptMK3.4rx@xxxxxxxxx
> In article <dl3enp$mi$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> "Neeraj Mathur"
> <neemathur@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> > How comparable is
> > the
> > German development - I'd be grateful if somebody could summarise it for
> > me -
> > to the Romance ones? What other languages does this extend to - is it in
> > Dutch?

[snip ***'s summary of Dutch past tenses]
> All four tenses are still common in Dutch. And in addition we have also
> four future tenses, also all four still common.)
>
> Apparently you have been talking with Germans from Southern Germany.

Thank you for the summary of Dutch, and the Wikipedia site. My friend, the
first one who called me out, is from the area near Dusseldorf; he went to
school at Salem however. I don't know where the others are from, although I
think one at least was from Munich. Is there any consensus in broadcast or
political German? I know that stage/musical standards seem to based on more
southerly forms of speech.

Having looked at the info on Dutch, I am struck by how similar it is to
English and the more southerly types of Romance. I'm now envisaging two
stages here:

1) In the wake of the fall of Rome, as mass migration and mobility take over
Europe, a first Sprachbund-type effect occurs (very roughly anchored around
1000 AD, give or take a few centuries), in which Romance and Germanic
broadly develop together a system of tenses featuring a preterite and a
compound perfect tense. These differ by reference point alone. Also formed
are a past perfect (pluperfect) and possibly a future perfect (does this
last exist in Germanic apart from English?). Imperfects may also develop
(Germanic?), differing from the preterite in aspect. Morphologically, the
perfects are all marked as compounds (whose theory was that?) because of the
separation of the reference point from the moment of the action; the
Germanic tongues, which started with only two tenses (present and past),
make the past the preterite to accord with this. Romance makes its imperfect
with the Latin morphology of the same tense/aspect; English (and other
Germanic?), lacking the morphology, do it periphrastically (Eng. 'I was
doing..' etc.). Some areas are too remote to take part in this fully; thus
Portuguese's tense-aspect system is slightly different.

2) After this process has stabilized the tense systems of the Romance and
Germanic tongues, a second innovation takes place, beginning in the centre
(with a focus somewhere around Switzerland), in which the preterite is
discarded and the compound past takes on its functions. This change having
started only a few centuries ago, it has not really reached far beyond North
Italy, France, and South Germany. (What about Catalan and Provencal in this
regard?) The outer languages conserve the structure achieved at the end of
Stage 1, thus seeming more conservative - Spanish, Italian, Northern German,
Dutch, British English.

I can see the second stage as being consistent with a general movement
towards higher analysis in the languages in question: the preterite is
abandoned because of its 'synthetic' morphology.

Does this sound reasonable? If so, what do we make of American English: is
its development completely unrelated? (The aspect system of English is, of
course, significantly different from anything on the continent; when does
this develop?)

Neeraj Mathur


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