# Development of the Syntax of Germanic languages under the influence of Latin



## berndf

This is a spin-off of discussion in thread "English - the Weight of the Germanic Component" which went a bit off topic and it was suggested to open a new thread.

Recap of discussion:


			
				sepia said:
			
		

> Whatever you say, the structure of the English language is Germanic - no matter how many words of Latin origin you use in your vocabulary, your grammar is still the same, and it is of Germanic origin. The conjugation of verbs based on Latin words is still the same as with all other verbs, adjectives are still before the nouns, articles are stil the same etc.


 
This lead to a discussion in how far the gammer of Germanic languages (English and others) has been influenced by Latin and Romance languages and how much of its original sytax has been retained in modern Germanic languages:



			
				berndf said:
			
		

> The English grammer has been influenced by Latin quite a lot. But this is no counter argument to what you said because Latin grammer has influenced that of other Germanic languages to the same extend, in the case of German maybe even more.
> 
> The biggest single Latin influence on Germanic languages is certainly the tempus system. Germanic languages had originally only present and past tenses.


 


			
				outsider said:
			
		

> I thought they still did. What has changed?


 


			
				berndf said:
			
		

> I am talking about the Syntax of English:
> English has a verb form expressing future (whether basic or not)
> English has a verb form expressing chronological sequence in the past (past perfect).





			
				berndf said:
			
		

> These things Old English did not have. As an example in modern English you can express things like "I will do this" implying wou havn't done it yet. With the syntactic means of Old English you couldn't. You had to qualify the sentence to express this, e.g.: "At a later time I do that".
> 
> In my mind this is a material change in English syntax (under the influence of Latin grammer)...


 
This was later rewritten:


			
				outsider said:
			
		

> So you think the Germanic future tense was created through the influence of Latin? Which kind of influence are you referring to? This is not a trivial question: I suppose that there may have been some _Sprachbund_ phenomenon at work. But I'm asking how direct you think the influence of Latin was.


 
The follwing is in reply to a later rewritten question


			
				outsider said:
			
		

> What makes you think that is due to the influence of Latin?


 


			
				berndf said:
			
		

> Yes, I think so.
> 
> Written language was in midieval times also exclusive domain of monks and their tendency to apply Latin syntactic constructs to their respective native language had significant impact on the development of standardized national languages. At least in the case of German this is very well documented.
> 
> Wouldn't you agree?


 


			
				outsider said:
			
		

> I'm afraid I would not. The preferences of monks can have an impact on spelling, vocabulary, and sometimes a _small_ influence on the pronunciation of particular words -- but I have never heard of the syntax of a language being substantially changed because of a minute elite of prescriptivists.


 


> Interesting. I thought this was common place, what of course doesn't means that it is correct. At least in the case of German I came accross this many times in text books. The lack of syntactic sophistication in many dialect compared to High German adds to the plausibility of this theory.
> 
> I would be extremely interested to get references if you had sources stating the opposite.


 


			
				frank06 said:
			
		

> ...You are kindly invited to open a new thread on the influence of Latin on German, and please do, because it is interesting.
> ...


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## Forero

I wish I knew more language history.  Pardon my rambling, but I have lots of questions about this issue.

First, I don't think English really has a future tense.  The idea of future can be expressed lots of ways, but they tend to mean other things:  "He won't go" can mean he (presently) refuses to go.  "You shall love the Lord ..." is an imperative, not a future indicative.  Maybe "I'm gonna see your hundred and raise you two hundred" is future?

English, French, and Spanish all have a "future tense" using _go_/_aller_/_ir_ plus an infinitive, but who started it?  My guess is that English started it because we always use the progressive _be_ + _going_ for this purpose, which is not particularly a Romance construction.  But does German have a "future" with _gehen_?  (The corresponding form in Catalan is a kind of past tense, not future. )

English and German have modal auxiliaries, followed by a bare infinitive, that are used for "future tense": _will_, _shall_, _werden_.  French and Spanish have added endings to the (contracted) infinitive reminiscent of the Latin future tense but derived from forms of _habere_.  Spanish also has the option of _haber de_ + infinitive.

I wonder what Celtic does for "future tense".

My French teacher taught me that French takes "future tense" more seriously than Spanish, English, or German, insisting on things like "après que je serai allé" ("after I will have gone").  Maybe that was prescriptive grammar from last century, but it may be telling us something.

By the way, who started the "perfect" constructions with _haben_/_have_/_avoir_/_haber_ or _sein_/_be_/_être_, Germanic or Romance?  Did French and Spanish pick _habere_ as the (main) auxiliary for perfect because it sounds like _haben_?


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## berndf

Forero said:


> By the way, who started the "perfect" constructions with _haben_/_have_/_avoir_/_haber_ or _sein_/_be_/_être_, Germanic or Romance? Did French and Spanish pick _habere_ as the (main) auxiliary for perfect because it sounds like _haben_?


 
Composite tenses as a replacement for lost Latin simple tenses occured already in early Vulgar Latin with the formation of future tense with infinitive + conjugated form of _habere_ (You mentioned that) as a replacement for the lost Latin future tense. (E.g. Latin _I will love_ is _amabo_ Vulgar Latin replaced this with _amare habeo_ from which e.g. Italian _amerò_ and French _aimerai_ are derived.)

I am not sure when and where the separation of perfect (composite) and historic perfect (simple) occured in Romance languages but the fact that it can be found in (to my knowlege) all Romance languages normally indicates a development which had started already in Vulgar Latin in imperial times or soon after (as in the above example with future tense). This would suggest a Vulgar Latin rather than a Germanic origin of this form.


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## Forero

I found a little discussion of the history of _habeo_ in _The Story of Latin and the Romance Languages_ by Mario Pei (1976).  Unfortunately, I have nothing about the history of Germanic future or perfect for comparison.  From Pei's book I see:

Cicero (1st cent. B.C.) used "_scribere habeo_" in the sense "I must write".
Plautus (2nd cent. B.C.) uses a construction like "_habeo cultellum comparatum_", which is either "I have a knife that I bought" or could possibly be "I have bought a knife."
Bishop Gregory of Tours (6th cent. Gaul) writes "_episcopum invitatum habes_" in the sense "You have invited the bishop."

When did similar things start turning up in Germanic?


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## berndf

Brilliant, I didn't know the book; I have to get it.

I think with Middle English or Mittelhochdeutsch. But I am not sure. Could anybody with access to _Onions, Modern English Syntax_ look what he has to say about it? I lost my copy ( ) but vaguely remember having read something about it there.


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## Sepia

berndf said:


> Composite tenses as a replacement for lost Latin simple tenses occured already in early Vulgar Latin with the formation of future tense with infinitive + conjugated form of _habere_ (You mentioned that) as a replacement for the lost Latin future tense. (E.g. Latin _I will love_ is _amabo_ Vulgar Latin replaced this with _amare habeo_ from which e.g. Italian _amerò_ and French _aimerai_ are derived.)
> 
> I am not sure when and where the separation of perfect (composite) and historic perfect (simple) occured in Romance languages but the fact that it can be found in (to my knowlege) all Romance languages normally indicates a development which had started already in Vulgar Latin in imperial times or soon after (as in the above example with future tense). This would suggest a Vulgar Latin rather than a Germanic origin of this form.



... so the future tense in modern Romance languages really isn't anything but the infinitive + conjugated auxiliary verb combined to one word - so basically it is the same principle and the same auxiliary verb as in Latin. They began writing it as one word some 300 years ago, as far as I know.

I really think this is totally different from any variation of future tense in any Germanic language I know of. Word order is different, auxiliary verb is different. And at least the future tense from the (Germanic) languages I have learned so far are used in a totally different way; only the near future "I am going to write this post" - "jeg skal lige til at skrive denne post" and other variations with other auxiliary verbs and other words don't give the same meaning as the conjugated future tense of F-IT-ES. The exact meaning of this future tense can in Germanic languages hardly be distinguished from present tense. He is coming. He is coming tomorrow. The verb definitely does not tell us much here. French: "Il viendra". We don't know when he is coming, but at least we know that it is not now.

That is totally different! Just because Germanic speaking people out of necessity had to invent some kind of future tense - and may have done so later than the Latin speaking - I still don't see that one group has influenced the other in any way on this point. 

If somebody has a good argument to prove that, write ...


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## berndf

Sepia said:


> I really think this is totally different from any variation of future tense in any Germanic language I know of. Word order is different, auxiliary verb is different. And at least the future tense from the (Germanic) languages I have learned so far are used in a totally different way; only the near future "I am going to write this post" - "jeg skal lige til at skrive denne post" and other variations with other auxiliary verbs and other words don't give the same meaning as the conjugated future tense of F-IT-ES. The exact meaning of this future tense can in Germanic languages hardly be distinguished from present tense. He is coming. He is coming tomorrow. The verb definitely does not tell us much here. French: "Il viendra". We don't know when he is coming, but at least we know that it is not now.


 
Future is an interesting case because it is still somewhat alien to Germanic languages (which is not the case with perfect tenses which are also non-original) in the sense that the use of Future tense is never mandatory. You can always revert back to the 'old way' of using present with a qualification (_Ich komme morgen_).

But there *is* a clear future tense in English (or German). Consider the following:
_Do you plan to come? I will come!_
This is as clear and unambiguous a future indicative as French
_J'arriverai._

Near future or continuous forms (_I am coming_) are different matters. Romance languages have developed there own forms here too (which are different from language to language and therefore probably not of Vulgar Latin origin). I am thinking of forms like
_Je suis en train d'arriver._ (FR near future)
_Sto arrivando. _(IT continuous form or near future)

I would like to concentrate on the forms of the Latin active indicative:
*Present* native to all Romance and Germanic languages - nothing to discuss
*Perfect/praeteritum* indistinguishable in Latin but distinguishable in Romance languages and in modern Germanic languages (though they are merging again in some); praeteritum being native in Germanic languages
*Imperfect* Non-existent in Germanic languages where praeteritum is used in stead
*Future* Composite tense in Germanic and Romance languages (contraced in modern Romance languages).
*Plusquamperfect* Composite tense in Germanic and Romance languages
*Future perfect* Composite tense in Germanic and Romance languages


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## Outsider

Perhaps I can add some insight concerning the Romance languages. Classical Latin had a synthetic *future tense*: *amabo* meant "I will love". But because of sound changes this tense began to be confused with the preterite/perfect in some of its forms. So Vulgar Latin gradually switched to a periphrasis of the form

infinitive of main verb + present tense of _habeo_ (to have)
e.g. *amare habeo* ("to love I have", "to love I must", or perhaps better "to love I hold", that is "I am sure to love")​Later, in the Romance languages, the two verbs in this periphrasis were fused, so that they are no longer regarded as separate words, but parts of a single word. For example in Spanish:

*amar (to love) + he (I have) = amaré (I will love)*
amar + has = amarás
amar + ha = amará
amar + hemos = amaremos
amar + h(ab)éis = amaréis
amar + han = amarán​Needless to say, this construction has nothing to do with the present perfect, even though it's also constructed with the auxiliary verb _habeo_ in the present tense.


On to the *present perfect*. This is a more recent development in the Romance languages, though I'm not able to say when it first appeared, exactly. But to some of the Romance languages it came rather late. In Portuguese, I think the present perfect is no more than a couple of centuries old. Galician still doesn't use it.

The structure of the Romance present perfect is exactly identical to the one of the English present perfect. The meaning is also close, in most cases. In some languages, like French, the present perfect has completely replaced the preterite in speech. Example in Spanish:

present perfect = present of _haber_ + past participle of main verb
*he amado = I have loved*
has amado = you have loved
ha amado = he/she has loved
etc...​

And since everyone has been asking interesting questions about possible parallels between Romance/Latin syntax and Germanic syntax, I would like to add one to the table: What, if any, is the relation between the Romance progressive tenses and the English progressive tenses? 

Not all Romance languages have *progressives* as developed as in English (the French progressive has a peculiar syntax and a very limited use, if one can even say that there is a progressive), but Spanish, Portuguese and Italian do. In these languages the syntax of the progressive is, again, exactly the same as that of the English progressive, their use being very close. Example from Italian:

present progressive = present tense of "to be" + present participle of main verb
*sto parlando = I am speaking*
stai parlando = you are speaking
etc...​Moreover, the time when these Romance languages developed their progressive tenses -- around the Renaissance; they didn't have them in medieval times -- seems to coincide with the time when English developed its progressive. Other Germanic languages don't have progressive tenses, as far as I know.


Is there a relation between Romance or Latin syntax and Germanic syntax in any of these three cases? And if so, in which direction did the influence flow? I don't know the answer, but the question certainly is interesting.


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## berndf

Outsider, thank you very much for recaping the development of Romance languages. 

You mentioned correctly that progessives are late commers. If these forms had been propagated my mutual influence between Germanic and Romance languages the mechanisms would certainly have been different form those at work with the other tenses.


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## berndf

You are right, the French doesn't have a proper progressive.
_Je suis en train de..._
is rather a near future as
_Je viens de..._
is a near past.

I see similarities between between Italian and English, both using forms which as a sort of blend of gerund and present participle. In Italian it is morphologically a gerund which has assumed the meaning of an active participle. While the English form is morphologically a verbal noun (-ing or -ling suffixes) which has absorbed the active participle.

Standard German has no continuous form but some dialects have it. Here a dative form of the infinitive is used (you _could_ say that in standard German too but it still sounds dialectal):
_    Ich bin das Buch am lesen_
Germanic languages originally had an oblique infinitive which Latin lacked (OE _eat/eatanne<_ME_ eat/to eat)._ If the above form is a remnant of this, I don't know. But probably not. Its lives on in constructs like _He comes to eat, Er kommt um zu essen_.


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## Outsider

berndf said:


> I would like to concentrate on the forms of the Latin active indicative:
> *Present* native to all Romance and Germanic languages - nothing to discuss
> *Perfect/praeteritum* indistinguishable in Latin but distinguishable in Romance languages and in modern Germanic languages (though they are merging again in some); praeteritum being native in Germanic languages


The preterite and the present perfect have followed very diverse paths in the Romance languages. 


In spoken French and some varieties of Italian and Spanish, the perfect (compound form) has completely overtaken the role of the preterite (simple form), and no distinction is made between them. 
Other varieties of Spanish and Italian (including their standard forms), as well as literary French to some extent, use both forms and distinguish them in much the same way that English does. 
Portuguese is in a more archaic stage, where the preterite is still the preferred choice, and use of the perfect is very restricted. 
Galician is the most conservative in this respect: it kept using the preterite alone. (I think that some varieties of Spanish do the same.)



berndf said:


> *Imperfect* Non-existent in Germanic languages where praeteritum is used in stead


But, you know, the simple past of the Germanic languages can take on a double role of preterite _and_ imperfect (examples). I wonder whether it's derived from an Indo-European preterite or an imperfect...



berndf said:


> *Future* Composite tense in Germanic and Romance languages (contraced in modern Romance languages).
> *Plusquamperfect* Composite tense in Germanic and Romance languages
> *Future perfect* Composite tense in Germanic and Romance languages


Portuguese, Galician and Romanian still have a synthetic pluperfect indicative, though it's become mostly literary in the former.


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## berndf

Outsider said:


> But, you know, the simple past of the Germanic languages can take on a double role of preterite _and_ imperfect (examples). I wonder whether it's derived from an Indo-European preterite or an imperfect...


 
Of course, you are right. Preteritum and imperfect are simply not distinguished in Germanic languages. 

My surmise is that Germanic preteritum corresponds to perfect. This is for morphological reasons: In Latin you have the 3 stems: Present, Perfect and Supine. In Germanic languages you have a present a past and a participle stem for strong verb. The hypothesis that there is a one-to-one correspondes imposes itself.


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## se16teddy

berndf said:


> But there *is* a clear future tense in English (or German). Consider the following:
> _Do you plan to come? I will come!_
> This is as clear and unambiguous a future indicative as French
> _J'arriverai._


If there is a clear future tense with _will _in English, I don't think this is a very good example. _I will come_ could just as much be a statement of present will (_= I consent to come_) as a reference to the future.

I think that a better example of the 'pure future' _will_ is seen in the (recent, I think) habit of using _would _to signal something that happened after something else. It comes up a lot in Wikipedia, for example here: _The Popham Colony was the first English colony in the region that would eventually become known as New England._ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popham_Colony Personally, I would have preferred _that later became known _or _was later to become known _here, but I think that it is an example of the use of _will _to refer to the future without other semantic baggage.


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## Outsider

se16teddy said:


> If there is a clear future tense with _will _in English, I don't think this is a very good example. _I will come_ could just as much be a statement of present will (_= I consent to come_) as a reference to the future.


But the Romance future can be used that way, too. 

By the way, using the present with a sense of future is common in many Romance languages (e.g. Spanish and, even moreso, Portuguese).



se16teddy said:


> I think that a better example of the 'pure future' _will_ is seen in the (recent, I think) habit of using _would _to signal something that happened after something else. It comes up a lot in Wikipedia, for example here: _The Popham Colony was the first English colony in the region that would eventually become known as New England._ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popham_Colony Personally, I would have preferred _that later became known _or _was later to become known _here, but I think that it is an example of the use of _will _to refer to the future without other semantic baggage.


That's a future-in-the-past, not a regular future.


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## se16teddy

Outsider said:


> But the Romance future can be used that way, too.


Surely Romance languages are entirely irrelevant to the question of whether _I will go _is a future tense? Or are you saying that the term 'future tense' is defined by reference to the way in which future tenses are used in Romance languages?


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## se16teddy

Outsider said:


> That's a future-in-the-past, not a regular future.


Yes, but it is the only example I can think of at the moment of a case in which the verb will / would is clearly used to signal the future and no other semantic issue.


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## Outsider

se16teddy said:


> Surely Romance languages are entirely irrelevant to the question of whether _I will go _is a future tense? Or are you saying that the term 'future tense' is defined by reference to the way in which future tenses are used in Romance languages?


What I am trying to note is that "future tense" is a morphological term, not a semantic one. The future tense isn't always used to talk about future actions, and this is not an oddity of English or the Germanic languages. It's common cross-linguistically, perhaps universal. The names we give to the tenses are just suggestive labels. They describe their _main_ function, not all their functions.



se16teddy said:


> Yes, but it is the only example I can think of at the moment of a case in which the verb will / would is clearly used to signal the future and no other semantic issue.


It's curious that you seem to follow a semantic definition of what "future tense" means, yet don't realize that a future-in-the-past is not a future in the strict semantic sense. It's a past -- it's gone, now.


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## konungursvia

A fascinating discussion, and I have a suggestion: go to modern Icelandic, whose grammar is so similar to Old English (pre-1066) that it is a degree requirement for a B.A. at Oxford in English. There, we see that many of these supposedly Latin structures were present in the Teutonic family of languages before the Normans. I wish I had the spellings here and available for immediate examples. Will look into this.

A side-note: someone asked when "I have done" appeared. This may not be relevant. We have the same structure in Cantonese (Chinese) so it is not a solid indicator of Latin influence, as it appears to spring from a Chomskyesque universal grammar, i.e. from the way we think.


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## Hulalessar

konungursvia said:


> Icelandic...is a degree requirement for a B.A. at Oxford in English.


 
I think you'll find it is optional.


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## Athaulf

konungursvia said:


> A side-note: someone asked when "I have done" appeared. This may not be relevant. We have the same structure in Cantonese (Chinese) so it is not a solid indicator of Latin influence, as it appears to spring from a Chomskyesque universal grammar, i.e. from the way we think.



There's no need to evoke any such controversial theories to explain the widespread emergence of "have done" perfect tenses. If a language has a passive participle of some sort, then it's often possible to form expressions by the pattern "I have it done", in which "have" is taken literally, rather than as a grammaticalized auxiliary verb. Such expressions literally say, "I have X, and Y has been done on X". Of course, such expressions can be used only with transitive verbs. However, with time the verb _to have_ can become grammaticalized, and the pattern can spread to non-transitive verbs as well, thus resulting in a compound perfect tense. 

It seems like an embryonic development along these lines is taking place in some Slavic languages.


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## berndf

Athaulf said:


> ..."I have X, and Y has been done on X". Of course, such expressions can be used only with transitive verbs.


 
That is why some languages (passé composé in French or Perfekt in German) construct this form with conjugations of _to be (être/sein)_ for intransitive verbs.


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## berndf

se16teddy said:


> If there is a clear future tense with _will _in English, I don't think this is a very good example. _I will come_ could just as much be a statement of present will (_= I consent to come_) as a reference to the future.


 
As a native speaker, would you really be in danger of misunderstanding this in modern every day speach? And let´s assume it be uttered by an American just to avoid the _I will/I shall_ issue.


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## Sepia

I can only aggee with *konungursvia *(Mandarin, similarities etc.). I coul also find similarites between Danish and Japanise in the way that something that is basically past tense is also used as a subjunctive when adressing somebody of higher rank politely. That both came up with such a verb form - out of necessity and social structure - still does not indicate that one influenced the other. 

Many of the verb forms in modern English have equivalents in Scandinavian languages. Scandinavia was not under Roman occupation or in any other way  under stron influence by the Romans.

I am still waiting for someone pointing at something that indicates a connection. What shows us that one language group's grammar influenced the other? 

(I am beginning to wonder if this in not a politico-emotional question rather than a linguistic one.)


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## Athaulf

berndf said:


> As a native speaker, would you really be in danger of misunderstanding this in modern every day speach? And let´s assume it be uttered by an American just to avoid the _I will/I shall_ issue.



Not to mention that in the spoken language, _I will_ is contracted into _I'll, _which can't happen when _will_ is used as a non-auxiliary verb of volition. Furthermore, _will _can be used to refer to future events that have no dependence whatsoever on the subject's volition, and with inanimate subjects incapable of volition_. _Obviously, _will_ is a fully grammaticalized auxiliary verb here. 



se16teddy said:


> If there is a clear future tense with _will _in English, I don't think this is a very good example. _I will come_ could just as much be a statement of present will (_= I consent to come_) as a reference to the future.



Honestly, I can't remember the last time I heard the verb_ to will_ used as a real verb of volition in the actual spoken language, except in a few frozen phrases like "whatever he wills" (and even those sound pretty bookish).


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## Forero

berndf said:


> As a native speaker, would you really be in danger of misunderstanding this in modern every day speach? And let´s assume it be uttered by an American just to avoid the _I will/I shall_ issue.



Yes, this is a real ambiguity, whether or not _will_ contracts to _'ll_.  The ambiguity is especially pronounced in the third person negative "he/she won't" = "he/she is unwilling/refuses":
_
"Mommy, Sandra won't leave me alone.  She keeps pulling my hair and sitting on my hand."

"Let Sandra have a turn with the CD player, Dear, and I'm sure she'll leave you alone.  If she still won't, we can stop the car and do some rearranging."
_
However, in the particular case in question, "Do you plan to come? I will come!", the word "will" will be stressed and the meaning will be "I promise to come - don't you doubt it!"  On the other hand, "I'll come" (unstressed "will") in the same context would not be as clear in meaning.


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## Erutuon

Forero said:


> I don't think English really has a future tense.  The idea of future can be expressed lots of ways, but they tend to mean other things:  "He won't go" can mean he (presently) refuses to go.  "You shall love the Lord ..." is an imperative, not a future indicative.  Maybe "I'm gonna see your hundred and raise you two hundred" is future?



But that's simply because _will_ historically (maybe less so today) had the meaning _want_ or _desire_, like Latin _volō_ and Greek _βούλομαι_ (_boúlomai_), and then was used (even in Old English, according to the OED) to express the future tense. _Shall_ expressed various things, like determination to do something ("I _shall_ win") or a strong command ("Thou shall not murder"), and eventually was used for the future tense like _will_. Possibly the similar use of _will_ and _shall_ also gave them similar meanings.

It's fairly certain that though there are other meanings for _will_/_shall_, they are used for the future tense.


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## zpoludnia swiata

Whether or not certain distinctions of grammatical form a made in a language that is also made in other languages may show a cultural relationship, not necessarily a linguistic genetic one.  So, if a lot of European languages have perfect verb forms (use of have as an auxiliary), this just shows that they have a common cultural background and have been interacting with each other over the last 1,000-2,000 years, whether they be English, French, Swedish, German or others.  This may show a kind of Sprachbund of grammatical/structural concepts and nothing else.


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## jazyk

> If a language has a passive participle of some sort, then it's often possible to form expressions by the pattern "I have it done", in which "have" is taken literally, rather than as a grammaticalized auxiliary verb.


Right, but this reasoning doesn't work in Swedish, which differentiates past participles from supines. Only past participles can be used in the passive voice (by the way, Swedish has a synthetic way of building the passive voice, common to other Nordic languages). If you want perfect tenses, you have to use the supine.
Bilen är tvättad (past participle). The car is washed.
Jag har tvättat bilen (supine). I have washed the car.

There is a striking similarity between the two, though, which could mean that they are related (and they must be, since Danish doesn't make this distinction and it must be a Swedish innovation - or maybe this also exists in Faroese or Icelandic, which I don't know squat about  ).


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## Outsider

From what I understand, the past participles of the Romance languages originate in Latin supines...


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## jazyk

That's possible, but Latin has both supines and past participle that look similar:

amare: past participle - amatus, amata, amatum; supine - amatum

I think what happened here is that since endings were eventually lost (this everybody knows), supines could be no longer differentiated from past participles.


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## se16teddy

Athaulf said:


> I can't remember the last time I heard the verb_ to will_ used as a real verb of volition in the actual spoken language, except in a few frozen phrases like "whatever he wills" (and even those sound pretty bookish).


 
I don't think I've ever heard 'whatever he wills', or indeed 'he wills' in general. What I do know is that if someone says 'Who will do the washing up?' and I say 'OK I will', in my head this is present consent, not a prediction of the future, nor an assertion of what the future is bound to hold. 

As far as I can see, grammarians try to draw a distinction between 1) mood (verb forms, including auxiliary verbs, indicating probability, possibility, frequency, obligation, volition etc) and 2) future tense (verb forms, including auxiliaries, indicating predictions and destinies), but neither English nor French verbs respect that distinction very much. The French so-called 'future tense' often signals a likelihood that is not restricted to the future (_Elle ne mange rien. Elle sera malade._ She isn't eating anything. She must be sick. http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA...nse.topicArticleId-25660,articleId-25640.html) As Outsider says in thread 8, the French future tense has its origin in a form (amare habeo) signalling obligation. The English so-called 'modal' verbs (especially 'will' and 'shall' but maybe also others) are often thought of as forming a 'future tense'. 

As far as I can see, the idea of mood will almost inevitably involve the idea of futurity: obligations and intentions most often refer to the future, and one good reason to be uncertain about an event is that it hasn't happened yet. I haven't seen any clear evidence that this blurring is the result of language interference.


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## berndf

se16teddy said:


> I don't think I've ever heard 'whatever he wills', or indeed 'he wills' in general. What I do know is that if someone says 'Who will do the washing up?' and I say 'OK I will', in my head this is present consent, not a prediction of the future.


 
_he will_ and _he wills_ are two different verbs.

The first is derived from OE _willan_ and is today used as an auxilliary for the future tense. The past pple. (would) is extinct. 
Present: _I/he/we/you/they will, thou willt, _pple:_ willing_
Past: _I/he/we/you/they would, thou would(e)st, _pple.:_ would_ (obs.)

The second decends from OE _willian_ and is inflected
_Present: I/we/you/they will, thou willest, he wills, _pple.: _willing_
Past:_ I/thou/he/we/you/they willed, _pple.:_ willed_

The seconds is rarely ever used and if used it means the (attempted) execution of a will not the pure state of having the will. It survived in some idiomatic phrases (_God willing_).


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## Hulalessar

I think that what happened is something like this:

Learned people who knew Latin started to write grammars of English. Since the only grammar they knew was Latin they described English in terms of Latin. This worked up to a point since English and Latin are after all both Indo-European languages. However, they made the mistake of believing that the only grammar was Latin grammar and, beyond trying to fit English grammar into the Latin mould, they went too far and started to impose Latin rules where they did not belong. All language is a convention and some people have agreed to conform to some or all of these rules; to that extent, and that extent only, Latin grammar has influenced English grammar.


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## berndf

That is exactly what I think as well. All standard national languages are to a certain extend artificial. No (sufficiently large) European Nation ever had a uniform language on it modern territory. Often important works of litterature have been defining mile stones in the development of standard languages. E.g. the works of Dante for Italian or Luther's bible translation for modern German.

To put this to a test one should compare standard and dialectal use. If this theory is right, dialectal speach should show less agreement with Latin grammer that standard speach.


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## Sepia

Hulalessar said:


> I think that what happened is something like this:
> 
> Learned people who knew Latin started to write grammars of English. Since the only grammar they knew was Latin they described English in terms of Latin. This worked up to a point since English and Latin are after all both Indo-European languages. However, they made the mistake of believing that the only grammar was Latin grammar and, beyond trying to fit English grammar into the Latin mould, they went too far and started to impose Latin rules where they did not belong. All language is a convention and some people have agreed to conform to some or all of these rules; to that extent, and that extent only, Latin grammar has influenced English grammar.



Why do you believ that influenced the languages in general? Only a few knew Latin - an probably even less cared about the theoretical grammar of their primary language. (Just like today.)

I don't think the Dante-example mentioned by someone else fits in. It is always a different situation when a language or dialect of a language is artificially introduced in a geographical area where it does not naturally belong. Similar to the situation with High German. I don't think you can compare that to the places where the languages went through an "unguided" development.


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## berndf

Sepia said:


> Why do you believ that influenced the languages in general? Only a few knew Latin - an probably even less cared about the theoretical grammar of their primary language. (Just like today.)
> 
> I don't think the Dante-example mentioned by someone else fits in. It is always a different situation when a language or dialect of a language is artificially introduced in a geographical area where it does not naturally belong. Similar to the situation with High German. I don't think you can compare that to the places where the languages went through an "unguided" development.


 
The code of the question is how "unguided" the devolopment of standard languages really was. You mentioned High German. It is a blend of vernaculars and is not identical with any of them. How significant is the influence of learned people who tried to systematize and document High German? And did they really only document it (E.g. when Luther said _dem Volk aus Maul geschaut_) or did they rather *form* the langauge to a certain degree?


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## Outsider

se16teddy said:


> As Outsider says in thread 8, the French future tense has its origin in a form (amare habeo) signalling obligation. The English so-called 'modal' verbs (especially 'will' and 'shall' but maybe also others) are often thought of as forming a 'future tense'.


Sorry, my post may have been misleading. 
The translations I wrote in it were purely my interpretations. I was just trying to explain what I think was the rationale behind the reinterpretation of those phrases as futures. But I never checked that that was how they were understood by native speakers at the time when they were adopted.


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## Sepia

berndf said:


> The code of the question is how "unguided" the devolopment of standard languages really was. You mentioned High German. It is a blend of vernaculars and is not identical with any of them. How significant is the influence of learned people who tried to systematize and document High German? And did they really only document it (E.g. when Luther said _dem Volk aus Maul geschaut_) or did they rather *form* the langauge to a certain degree?



Exactly, that is really THE question. But when we look at where we came from and where we are now in - I think - most of the Germanic languages, or at least Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and English they developed from highly complex grammar to rather simple Grammar over a period of a few hundred years. That this does not necessarily have to happen you can see if you compare Icelandic with Norwegian or Danish. The languages spoken in Northern Germany are not that complex either. 
I'd say, that High German kept a good deal of its highly complex structure and variations till today may very well have to do with the fact that it was introduced into the various areas where it is spoken today together with the first Bible translated into any kind of German. Since this is not just any book, rather than something that is quoted and read and re-read etc. this may, I think, have had considerable influence on the further development of this regional language which was spread all over what is now called Germany  which kept it language as the official language.

I don't see anything - any tradition or literal work or anything that could have kept the original spirit of the language or languages spoken in, say Jutland, alive for centuries or even a millenium, like in Iceland. Most people could not read. It took centuries before the priests ware preaching in a language they could understand and their traditional "literature" relied on persons being able to memorize and tell the old stories ...

In Iceland the oral tradition survived longer than anywhere else - until they began writing down the old stories. 

I suppose a language stays as complex as it needs to be under the circumstances.


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## Hulalessar

Sepia said:


> ...most of the Germanic languages, or at least Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and English they developed from highly complex grammar to rather simple Grammar over a period of a few hundred years.


 
These languages have not become less complex - they have just changed the areas in which they are complex.


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## Frank06

*Hi,*

*If I am not wrong, the topic of this thread is "Development of the Syntax of Germanic languages under the influence of Latin".*
*I think it is about time somebody here starts to give some examples and some explanation related to this topic.*
*Otherwise I don't see a reason to keep this thread open.*

*Groetjes,*

*Frank*
*Moderator*


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## Athaulf

se16teddy said:


> I don't think I've ever heard 'whatever he wills', or indeed 'he wills' in general.



There's a well-known quote by Schopenhauer, usually translated into English as: _"Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills."_  (_"Der Mensch kann was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will."_)



> What I do know is that if someone says 'Who will do the washing up?' and I say 'OK I will', in my head this is present consent, not a prediction of the future, nor an assertion of what the future is bound to hold.


Interesting. It seems like I was very wrong about his, and apparently my feeling for this sort of thing is still very different from native speakers...  But thanks a lot for the info.


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## Hulalessar

Sepia said:


> Why do you believ that influenced the languages in general? Only a few knew Latin - an probably even less cared about the theoretical grammar of their primary language. (Just like today.)


 
The rules to which I refer were diffused through the language by general education. They do, as you suggest, tend to apply to written rather than spoken language. Even so, there are people who spend their lives listening to the BBC waiting for split infinitives so that they can write and complain when they hear one; one listener noted two hundred in a month.


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## Sepia

Hulalessar said:


> The rules to which I refer were diffused through the language by general education. They do, as you suggest, tend to apply to written rather than spoken language. Even so, there are people who spend their lives listening to the BBC waiting for split infinitives so that they can write and complain when they hear one; one listener noted two hundred in a month.



What general education? We are talking about he middle ages and even earlier. We are talking about periods that are deepest pits of ignorance, misinformation and lack of education in history. We are talking about times where people began believing that the Earth is flat although it used to be well known it is not.

If it is like you say, there must be some time in history, where there was a significant difference in the grammar of the few "educated" people and the general population which then gradually, later in history, must have assimilated their language to that of the "educated" minority. Is that what you mean has happened? What speaks for this theory?


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## Frank06

*The topic is, or rather was, the "Development of the Syntax of Germanic languages under the influence of Latin".*
*Due to the amount of off topic posts, I am closing this thread.*

*Please feel free to start new threads.*

*Frank*
*Moderator EHL*


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