Aspect and Tense

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.) I in 1998 at the age of 94, Giuliano Bonfante published a book that he had written in 1940. He was an Italian, educated in Italy, but he withdrew to Paris for his advanced studies and to Spain for his first academic posts where he founded Emerita. He went on to Geneva and in 1939 sailed to America and a chair at Princeton. This was where he wrote a book ultimately published in English concerning the origin of the romance languages. Fifteen years later he left Princeton where he had helped to found Word, the journal of the Linguistic Circle of New York, to take up appointments successively at Genoa, Turin and finally in 1970 Rome, where in 1994 he published La Lingua parlata in Orazio (Venosa), a revised edition of a book first published in Spanish in 1936 (Los elementos populares en la lengua de Oracio). He admitted to his daughter Larissa, by then a scholar in her own right, that he would love to see his 1940 book also published. She undertook the editing of it and published it with some changes.1 Bonfante's strength was in his detailed knowledge of the Italian dialects and in the whole field of Romance languages. It had generally been believed that Italian (as the form of Latin still spoken to-day in Italy) and Spanish were the closest Romance Languages to classical Latin, and French perhaps the furthest removed. Bonfante challenged this view and argued that the Romance Languages reflected the state of Latin as it was at the time of the Roman occupation of the province concerned, so that Sardinia and Sicily preserved a Latin of 241 B.C., Spain of 200 B.C., Gaui of 50 B.C. and Dacia of A.D. 108.2 The situation is not quite as simple as that, but Bonfante draws attention to the French retention of final s and final /, at least in spelling, but also in pronunciation in some conditions of liaison3, or as I would prefer to use the Sanskrit term sandhi. But in French consider the pronunciation of les hommes and il y a as contrasted with y a-t-il. The latter is no doubt far from ibi habet ille, but the connection is there. Now it is from this final t of the third person of the verb that I would begin my argument. With it I would link the -m of the first person of the verb. It seems probable that the 2nd person is formed in a similar manner but there is not the same agreement as to the original form of the 2nd person, so I prefer to base my argument on the firmer ground of the 1st and 3rd persons. I shall also base my argument on what are traditionally called secondary forms, although the actual forms and the more sophisticated meanings of the primary, that is present, forms make it clear enough that the so-called secondary forms are in fact older in formation. II It is generally accepted that the personal endings -m and -t are connected with the pronouns of the first and third persons, but it is not so well observed that these endings are oblique forms of the pronouns, so: We cannot therefore assume that a root verbal form such as the following: could once have been understood as 'come into being he', so too in the 1st person Skt. bhu;-m and Gk. ... cannot have been 'come into being G. I am not at this stage of the argument implying any certainty about tense in my translation which is intended merely to identify the root ideas. At this stage we cannot assume that there was such a thing as a finite verb. Rather we must think in terms of a state of language that recognised names of persons and things that became nouns, names of qualities that became adjectives and names of actions that became verbs. In passing one may note that traditional Arabic grammar recognises only three parts of speech: nouns, verbs and particles - and the particles are clearly in most cases a reduction of nouns (for example adverbs formed from original accusative cases). To return to the postulated name of an action, the original meaning of bhu-m, bhu;-t and its cognates must be 'coming into being of me' and 'coming into being of him'. …