How Dead Languages Work by Coulter H. George

Author:Coulter H. George [George, Coulter H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192594143
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2020-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

In all three languages, the future can thus easily be analyzed as the addition of endings to the infinitive. Those endings, as it happens, are the same as the present-tense forms of the verb “to have”; the initial h- in the Spanish and Portuguese forms is silent:

It is thus as clear as anything in historical linguistics ever is that the future tense of the Romance languages is not the direct outgrowth of the Latin future tense (which for these forms was amābō, amābis, amābit), but of what in Latin would have been a periphrastic construction amāre habeō, amāre habēs, amāre habet (“I have to love, you have to love, s/he has to love”). In English, of course, “to have to verb” indicates obligation or necessity rather than futurity. But it’s not hard to see how, in a different language, the idea of “having” a verb could instead suggest the capacity to do it or possibility thereof, thus leading to the development of a future sense. What’s more, while the forms of “to have” have completely fused with the infinitive in Spanish and French, formal European Portuguese remains at an earlier stage in this process: unstressed personal object pronouns can still be inserted in between the infinitive stem and the forms of haver. Thus “he will love you”, in elevated speech, is amar-te-á, with the insertion of a so-called mesoclitic pronoun, here te “you”. Finally it should also be noted that haber/haver is only one of two verbs in Spanish and Portuguese that mean “to have”. Much more common, as a full verb, is Spanish tener, Portuguese ter. Here we see another common linguistic phenomenon in play: when a word like habēre loses ground to an upstart like tenēre (originally “to hold”), one context in which the older verb can survive is in grammatical constructions like these. And the whole process whereby a word gradually goes from being a full word with its own semantic force (“I have a car”), to an auxiliary word used to mark a grammatical feature, like tense (“I have walked”), to an unstressed unit that no longer counts as a full word, but, as a so-called enclitic, leans on another (“I’ve walked”), to a ending that’s become fused with its host word (“aimerai”) is what linguists call grammaticalization.

Armed with this example of grammaticalization taking place over a period of time that’s left written records, we can now turn to endings of the older Indo-European languages where we can only see the end result. First, take the Latin future endings that were replaced by the construction with “to have” in the Romance languages: amā-bō, amā-bis, amā-bit “I will love, you will love, s/he will love” all look as if they could have arisen from the same sort of fusing of an auxiliary verb (bō, bis, bit) with an unchanging verbal stem. That some sort of b-initial verb was brought into play in the prehistory of Latin in order to form the future is further suggested by the

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