etymology of WANT

[Nick Thieberger]

The verb ‘to say’ in South Efate also has a range of other functions
including: the expression of a purposive; marking inchoative or
incipient action; and acting as the verb ‘to want’. A morpheme with a
similar range of functions is noted for
Lolovoli by Hyslop (2001:386), and the verb ika in Anejom means both
‘say’ and ‘to want’ (Lynch 2000:162). The grammaticalization of the
verb ‘say’ as a complementizer or 'want' is not uncommon in languages
of the world (cf. Lord 1976;
Chapter 12; Saxena 1988).

Hyslop, Catriona. 2001. The Lolovoli dialect of the North-East Ambae
language, Vanuatu. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
Lord, Carol. 1976. Evidence for syntactic reanalysis: from verb to
complementiser. Papers from the parasession on diachronic syntax.
Chicago: CLS. 179–191
Lynch, John. 2000. A grammar of Anejom. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics Canberra:
Pacific Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian
National University.
Saxena, Anju. 1988. On syntactic convergence: The case of the verb ‘say’ in
Tibeto-Burman. In Proceedings of the fourteenth annual meeting. Berkely,
California: Berkely Linguistics Society. 375–388.



Nick Thieberger, PhD
Assistant Professor
Language Documentation and Conservation
Department of Linguistics
University of Hawai'i at Manoa
1890 East-West Road
Honolulu, HI 96822



2009/5/28 Hilario De Sousa <hilario.desousa at usyd.edu.au>:
>
> *sorry for cross-posting, and thanks to those (mainly Austronesianists) who
> have replied on the Papuan list!*
>
> Dear Austronesianists,
>
> Wayne Lawrence (wp.lawrence at auckland.ac.nz) is looking into
> the grammaticalisatin of 'desideratives' (both lexical and
> grammatical).  For instance, English «want» is
> grammaticalised from an original meaning of 'lack'.  An
> interesting case is the Japanese verbal suffix «-tai», which
> is said to come from «itai» 'sore, hurts', via 'extremely'
> (the earliest instances of -itai, in the late Heian period,
> have the interpretation of 'very'.  The path SORE -->
> EXTREMELY is also found in German «sehr» 'very', c.f. English
> «sore»).  Do you know of any other examples of EXTREMELY -->
> WANT?  The etymology of WANT in other languages would also be
> hugely appreciated.
>
> Hilário de Sousa on behalf of Wayne Lawrence
>
> _______________________________________________
> An-lang mailing list
> An-lang at anu.edu.au
> http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/an-lang
>
>

_______________________________________________
An-lang mailing list
An-lang at anu.edu.au
http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/an-lang