qwed117 wrote: ↑04 Jan 2023 10:03
I think that English and the Romance languages all sharing the same perfect construction consisting of a verb that is roughly shaped like "have" and a past participle is pretty strange, and that similarity is even stronger in Spanish and Italian where the other half of the construction contains a verb suffixed with a vowel and a coronal stop. If you're more lenient with the pattern, you can add in Modern Greek which uses έχω <echo>, effectively "eho", plus a verb with a suffix containing a coronal fricative. Interestingly, the base form in Ancient Greek is //hekho//, with the initial /h/ deleted by Grassman's law-but in Ancient Greek it couldn't be used to make perfects. The funnier thing about this though, is that all three constructions are completely unrelated (at least to my knowledge)
(Major/National) Languages that do this: English, Icelandic, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Greek, Swedish, Norwegian
Languages that don't: French, German, Dutch, Slavic languages, Celtic languages, Finnish, Romani, etc.
Huh? The perfect in German is likewise formed with "have", surely, just as in English? And likewise in French? And also I assume Dutch? I don't think the fact that the perfect is increasingly used more broadly than in English in colloquial speech in several languages should really cause us to pretend that it's not the same phenomenon in all the languages.
And yes, the haben and habere constructions are
clearly related by calqueing, probably from Latin. [I think some people still blame the Franks, but certainly it was more widespread in Latin than in some later Germanic languages, like English (it's used much more often in Old English translations of Latin than in native texts), which suggests a Latin origin, or at least rapid adoption in Latin, though that doesn't rule out the Latin fashionable over-adoption of a Frankish construction and then re-adoption back into Germanic languages in its new more extensive form. Then again, the overwhelming direction of linguistic influence in general (grammatical and lexical) seems to be from Latin into Proto- and Old Germanic, not vice versa]
Rather than seeing this as a 'peripheral' feature, I'd have thought it was one of the central and strongest elements of Standard Average European. Because it's not actually one feature, it's a whole chronological series of developments clearly loaned between languages:
- the adoption of a "hab" verb of holding for possession (though of course habana and habere aren't actually cognate)
- the creation of a periphrastic perfect with auxiliary hab + passive participle for actions, and "to be" + participle for states
- the spread of the hab+ form to all transitive verbs, but retention of "to be" for intransitive verbs
- the spread of the hab+ form to many transitive verbs, leaving only a relict class taking "to be"
- the spread of the hab+ form to all verbs
meanwhile:
- the spread of the perfect from only situations with a strong emphasis on resultant states to any past event with present relevance
- the spread of the perfect from only past events with present relevance to any past event with strong telicity or completivity
- the spread of the perfect to all past events without strong imperfectivity
- the spread of the perfect to all past events aside from a relict class of highly perfective verbs
- the spread of the perfect to all past events
Different languages obviously fall at different points on these paths, and different dialects or registers may do also (with more progress usually in colloquial forms). And some of the common development along both paths can be ascribed to genuine convergent evolution. But the following of two such clear paths simultaneously in all of Western Europe, without any notable divergence (languages may be faster or slower but haven't broken off in totally different directions) is clearly the result of extensive grammatical influence between languages.