Celtic substrate influence

[Larry Trask]

On Fri, 23 Apr 1999, Vidhyanath Rao wrote:

> Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk> wrote:
> > In Parisian French, the preterite seems to have disappeared from
> > speech by about the 16th century, according to Price,

> I have seen the statement made that in the 17th c., the distinction
> was that perfect = past of today and attributed to something called
> Port Royale Grammar. [Comrie's book on Tense might have been the
> source.] I don't know if this refers to the written language, but
> that seems a bit odd.

This is precisely the state of affairs in Castilian Spanish today: the
perfect is used as a past tense to denote events occurring earlier on
the same day.  Such a form has been dubbed a `hodiernal past'.

The perfect was indeed used likewise as a hodiernal past in the kind of
French described in the Port Royal grammar.  That grammar, I think,
describes the formal literary French of the day, rather than vernacular
speech, so it need not be inconsistent with Price's conclusion.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk