# The origin of the auxiliaries



## curius

Where did they come from?
Who invented them?


----------



## Testing1234567

Which language are you referring to?


----------



## Riverplatense

It could be a development from rather abstract morphological marks to verbs having rather concrete meanings, so maybe, before all in their early stages, auxiliary verbs did not lack their actual lexical meaning.

In any case it's interesting that there are a lot of similar developments, like in German (even though I'm not sure about its originality), Romance languages (even though _habere + p. p._ can also be found in Classical Latin), Greek etc. I find it particularly interesting that also Basque uses auxiliary verbs with the meaning of ‹to have› and ‹to be›, even though also in present tense.


----------



## curius

Oh.
So you reckon it might be an indo-european trait?
And Basque, was it influenced or did it have them originally?


----------



## Riverplatense

curius said:


> So you reckon it might be an indo-european trait?
> And Basque, was it influenced or did it have them originally?



Unfortunately, I have exactly the same questions as you, and all I could do is suppose something based on limited knowledge. It would be interesting to see whether or not there are other non-indo-european languages showing a development like that. I know very few about the history of the Basque language, however, I'm afraid that the oldest sufficient sources might not be old enough to really show a development, even though there are some entire sentences dated back to around 1000 and after. I'm not sure if an agglutinating language like Basque, whose verbal morphology is so different from the Latin/Spanish one, can be influenced that significantly by such a language. The more so as in modern Basque there are no alternatives for analytic verb expressions. If you want to say ‹I see›, in Basque it's necessarily _ikusten _(to see, progressive)_ dut_ (I have), ‹I have seen› is _ikusi _(to see, preterite) _dut _(I have), there's no form without auxiliar verb. So it would be remarkable if an interference from Spanish/Vulgar Latin would completely substitute a synthetic form — and yet there are also synthetic forms in the Basque verbal morphology, like exactly those of the auxiliary verbs.


----------



## Riverplatense

By the way it would be even more remarkable because of the fact the auxiliary verb's form depends on the number of the object(s), so ‹I see the girl› means _neska ikusten dut_, however, ‹I see the girls› means _neskak ikusten d*it*ut_, it's getting more complicated when there's a dative object, too.

It would be hard to believe that a language could extend an imported system in this way, even though it's just analogical to the actual meaning (_liburu bat dut_ ‹I have a book› vs. _liburu batzuk d*it*ut_ ‹I have some books›).


----------



## Testing1234567

curius said:


> Oh.
> So you reckon it might be an indo-european trait?
> And Basque, was it influenced or did it have them originally?



This is also present in Chinese. 我有見過他：
我 - I
有 - have
見 - to see
過 - perfect marker
他 - he (him)

Whether this is copied from other European languages, I do not know.


----------



## curius

Great!
Back to square one then.

Testing1234567, what do they teach at university about when to use that tense? Is that different from your perception of its use in mandarin literature?


----------



## curius

The more I look at this auxiliary thingy the weirder it becomes. Like saying a familiar word repeatedly over and over.
Who on earth came up with the idea with throwing in the ideas of power, possession and existence, respectively, so that they could say:

- it could have been a donkey.

while they could have just said:

- it be+(tense-suffix-otherwise-meaningless) a donkey


----------



## Testing1234567

Here you go: "could" did not mean power, "have" did not mean possession, and "been" did not mean existence.

"Could" denotes possibility not power. (I can swim -> it is possible for me to seim.)

"Have" did not denote possession. (Est mihi liber -> there is to me a book = I have a book)

"Been" did not denote existence. ("I am" for "I exist" would be a later semantic shift; "It is an apple" is simply a copula)


----------



## J.F. de TROYES

curius said:


> Where did they come from?
> Who invented them?



This thread explains how the auxiliaries can be traced back from Latin to Romance languages.


----------



## berndf

Testing1234567 said:


> "Could" denotes possibility not power. (I can swim -> it is possible for me to seim.)


That is the same thing.


Testing1234567 said:


> "Have" did not denote possession. (Est mihi liber -> there is to me a book = I have a book)


The fact that a language has several ways to express possession does not mean that _have _cannot express possession too. That is no argument.

As to the verb _have_ in English, it is cognate to Latin _capere _(=_seize_) and has therefore indeed undergone a slight twist in in meaning. But that is a different story and does not apply to the Latin verb _habere _which has a different etymology.


Testing1234567 said:


> "Been" did not denote existence. ("I am" for "I exist" would be a later semantic shift; "It is an apple" is simply a copula)


The full verb and the copula meaning of the verb_ be_ stand side by side and as a full verb it does indeed mean _exist_. But the Germanic verb be is a bit of a bastard. It is a suppletion of three originally independent verbs: _is/sind/are_, cognate to Latin sum meaning _exist_, _beon _meaning _become, grow_ and were/was meaning _stay, remain_.

But back to the question: In European languages at least, all auxiliaries can satisfactorily be explained by frozen, grammaticallized periphrastic expressions.


Riverplatense said:


> In any case it's interesting that there are a lot of similar developments, like in German (even though I'm not sure about its originality), Romance languages (even though _habere + p. p._ can also be found in Classical Latin), Greek etc.


It is an a construction that emerged in classical Latin and was grammaticalized in VL/Proto-Romance. In Germanic languages it is an adopted form.

The semantics is to carry the perfect aspect of the ppl into the predicate. _I have read a book _means literally _I have a read book_ (=_I have a book that is read_). A faint reflex of this original meaning is the grammatical agreement of the participle with object rather than the subject under certain conditions in Romance languages:
_Je lui ai vu.
Je l'ai vu*e*.
Je les _[masculine] _a vu*s*.
Je les _[feminine]_ a vu*es*._


----------



## ahvalj

Not quite sure what exactly the thread is about. Just to enliven the discussion, some East European evidence. Baltic, Slavic, Baltic-Finnic and Sami languages differ from Italic, Germanic and Celtic in possessing an opposition of Active and Passive, Present and Past Participles (making/the-one-who-made/the-one-being-made/made). This has allowed to develop a different kind of Resultative, similar to the Romance _je suis venu/j'étais venu/je serai venu, _but not limited lexically and not dependent on the transitivity/intransitivity. So, we find e. g.:

"I have made" — "I am the-one-who-made"
"We have made" — "We are those-who-made"

the participle thus fully agrees in number, case and gender (in Baltic and Slavic) with the subject (cp. _je suis venue, nous sommes venus, nous sommes venues_)

Lithuanian: _esu daręs _(Nom. Sg. masc.)_ — esame darę _(Nom. Pl. masc.)
Old Church Slavonic: _jesmь sъdělalъ — jesmъ sъdělali_
Finnish: _olen tehnyt — olemme tehneet.
_
This construction is obviously independent from the Romance one. The question is whether Baltic-Finnic and Sami, which belong to the Uralic family, developed it under the Baltic influence. Other related Uralic languages (including the closest ones, Erzyan and Mokshan), lack such forms, but may possess another construction, when the conjugated forms of the lexical verb are supplemented with unchanged forms of "to be".

In most Slavic languages, the former Resultative has become a plain Past, and new periphrastic Resultatives tended to develop. In West Slavic they look calqued from the Romance/Germanic pattern (Czech _mám úděláno_ = _I have made_), whereas dialectal Russian has recreated the old _be_-Resultative but with another Past participle (_я сделавши/ja sdʲelavši_).


----------



## J.F. de TROYES

Testing1234567 said:


> This is also present in Chinese. 我有見 過 他：


 
As far as I know, the sentence would be also accurate without 有  ,  the past being expressed by the particle 過. Do you mean that using 有 here emphasizes the idea of a past event ?


----------



## CapnPrep

J.F. de TROYES said:


> As far as I know, the sentence would be also accurate without 有  ,  the past being expressed by the particle 過. Do you mean that using 有 here emphasizes the idea of a past event ?


It it technically perfective aspect, not past tense (although 過 does indicate the result of a past experience). And moreover the auxiliary 有 can also occur with some stative and habitual verbs with present tense interpretation, especially in the interrogative form 有没有 and the negative form 没有.

This Masters thesis about the development of the auxiliary 有 in Mandarin suggests that it was already a perfective auxiliary in Old Chinese. (If correct, it follows that 有 cannot be a modern borrowing from English or other European languages.) This usage was lost or reduced in Mandarin, but retained in Southern languages like Cantonese, and it is currently being reintroduced into Mandarin as a "trendy" structure through contact with these languages. 

Mandarin has several other verbs that could be considered auxiliaries in some contexts (會，要，得，該，甭，etc.).


----------



## J.F. de TROYES

Thanks a lot, CapnPrep, for your key information about this meaning of 有 I did'nt know at all . As far as I know,  it is not considered an auxiliary in Chinese grammars like those you have quoted, but grammars are always running behind a spoken language ! So can we say Mandarin has auxiliaries expressing aspect as 有 or 要 (in some contexts)) , and not only modality ?

( No time to read now this Master thesis , but it's of a great interest and I'll do it as soon aspossible )


----------



## curius

So, might they be a human characteristic, the outcome of some developmental stage?
Still quite a lot of coincidence, specially for tenses which are so nuanced in their meaning.


----------



## M Mira

curius said:


> So, might they be a human characteristic, the outcome of some developmental stage?
> Still quite a lot of coincidence, specially for tenses which are so nuanced in their meaning.


Treating an experience as an object, and use existential or possessive words to link it to the experiencer seems to be quite natural to me.

Also, 有 is technically more existential than possessive, we use it instead of the copula for cases like "Here be dragons" or "There's a car", so it's similar but not the same as the Indo-European usage.


----------



## Gavril

ahvalj said:


> Not quite sure what exactly the thread is about. Just to enliven the discussion, some East European evidence. Baltic, Slavic, Baltic-Finnic and Sami languages differ from Italic, Germanic and Celtic in possessing an opposition of Active and Passive, Present and Past Participles (making/the-one-who-made/the-one-being-made/made).



It seems pretty common that, if a language has participles at all, it will have an active and passive participle for each of its main tense/aspect categories. Greek has _didónt_- "giving" (imperfect active), _didómeno_- "being given" (imperfect passive), _dedōkót_- "having given" (perfect active), etc.

Germanic and Latin/Italic seem more like outliers in this respect, or at least it isn't clear they are the norm against which to compare languages that (unlike them) have past-active participles.

I don't think that Celtic languages have a productive system of participles to begin with (except for those that have developed one more recently). This is definitely true of Welsh, which prefers periphrastic constructions with prepositions + verbal nouns:

_yn rhoi_ "giving" (_yn_ = "in")
_wedi rhoi_ "having given" (_wedi_ = "after")
_wedi'i roi _"given" (_wedi_ + genitive pronoun corresponding to the subject)
etc.


----------

