Celtic substrate influence

[Vidhyanath Rao]

Frank Rossi <iglesias at axia.it> wrote
> 1)  in North-West Spain, Galicia and Asturias, which are considered,
> rightly or wrongly, the most Celtic areas of Spain, the two forms of the
> past tense have been reduced in normal usage to one (the simple past)
> and
> 2) a similar phenomenon can be observed in Northern France, Northern Italy
> and SOUTH GERMANY

Reduction of different ways of expressing past events is found elsewhere
also. In IE languages, it happened twice in Indian: Imperfect and aorist
coalace in Pali into a single past tense; the new preiphrastic resultative
based on the PPP was created to replace the reduplicated perfect. The latter
then supplanted the former in latter Prakrits. Latin Perfect contains forms
that go back to the aorist or perfect in PIE. That too suggests a
resultative => `present perfect' => past. Bybee et al ``The evolution of
grammar'' give more likely examples of resultative/present perfect becoming
either simple past or a perfective past. It seems that we do not need
substratum explanations for this.

-Nath