RE: Re: have

From: Ben Crick (ben.crick@argonet.co.uk)
Date: Tue Aug 26 1997 - 01:56:56 EDT


On Mon 25 Aug 97 (17:43:06), charles.stevens@unisys.com wrote:
[snip]
> But it strikes me that while "to me [is] the book" strikes *English*
> speakers as a strange way of expressing the idea, "I have the book"
> would strike a Russian as strange. Is there any more import to "Y
> MENyA KNHGA" in terms of grammatical history than, for example,
> identifying the referent for the pronoun in "it is raining" in English?

 Thank you Chuck. I always considered hUPARCEIN and ECEIN as synonyms, and
 the alternation between them just for stylistic variation, rather than for
 any fine-tuned difference in meaning. Not in Koiné anyway.
 "It is raining"? HDËT DOZhDb? Hmmm.

> The absence of the *present* tense of "to be" in this construction is a
> separate feature of the language unrelated to the idiom of possession
> expressed by the preposition. That may be be confirmed by "Y MENyA BILA
> KNHGA", for example.

 I don't know if there is an accepted transliteration convention for Cyrillic
 into Latin. Your mention of "Y MyENyA BILA KNHGA" (past) reminds me of the
 word "yESTb", "there is/are": a sort of impersonal present tense of perfective
 BITb. The imperfective BIVATb is something else. The Russian verb, like the
 Hebrew verb, is more into Aspects than Tenses, don't you think? We had a long
 thread recently on Aspects of the Greek verb, did we not. Just a thought.

-- 
 Revd Ben Crick, BA Bristol, 1963 (hons in Theology)
 <ben.crick@argonet.co.uk>
 232 Canterbury Road, Birchington, Kent, CT7 9TD (UK)
 


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