Discussion Groups / British English / March 2005

No, I know about these round-the-houses ways of indicating ongoing
action. We even have them in English, especially of the Synge dialect
sort: "He is over beyant in Dingle an' he at the drinkin'" sort of
Paddywhackery.

Where the original question was starting from:

In the three main languages historically sharing the British Isles (I'm
counting the Gaelic dialects as one, and not counting Latin or French),
two seem to have had this progressive 'I am doing' construction as the
main present tense form. English adopted it later, though I don't know
when it arrived in writing, or if there was pedantic resistance to it.

It seems to be uncommonly used, as a special effect only, in most other
European languages.

Some time ago, on the Britarch list, there was a discussion concerning
the apparent poverty of words in English from the ancient British
language (palaeo-Welsh), and this was used as an argument for large
scale replacement of the native population.

It occurred to me at the time that the structure of the progressive
present tense could be an adoption from one of the Celtic languages,
preserved by the ex-Celtic Anglo Saxon peasants, and ignored by the
(aristocratic and conservative) AS literary language. The destruction of
the literary elite by the Norman conquest allowed many (perhaps demotic)
features to come through into writing- notably the collapse of gender,
case inflexion, concordance etc.

But for the progressive present to be part of the package (how's that
for AS alliteration?) timing is all. I can't find any examples of it in
the few middle-English sources available to me (Gawain, Piers Plowman,
riddles, Sir Orfeo, one or two more) but neither can I find when it DID
come in. I sometimes suspect that the 'special' nature of writing prior
to the invention of printing inhibited the use of forms thought to be
ungrammatical- but that's not evidence.

So the question is: did this usage spring up spontaneously, was it
adopted from another (higher status?) European language, was it adopted
from (definitely low-status) Irish or Welsh, or did it rise from the
underground of English dialect, the Brythonic language showing through
the flourishing growth of English like a crop mark in a field?

Paul Burke

In Irish there is also a present continuous tense - "Tá sé ag ithe arán"
= "He's eating bread" as distinct from "Itheann sé arán" = "He eats bread".

Regards, Einde O'Callaghan

Yes.

The latter.  No pun involved.  The 'dikke Van Dale' (Dutch equivalent
of the OED) defines 'zuipen' as various forms of drinking heavily or
consuming too much liquid (cf. a car with a big engine).  It is
apparently etymologically related to the verb 'slurpen', which might
ring a few bells with English monoglots.

No, that would be 'proost' or some such.  There is no sense of
toasting in 'zuipen'.  Just overindulgence.  'Ik zit te zuipen' is a
progressive or periphrastic present, just like the one in English.

Giles