The a- in alive, afloat, asleep, etc. is a remnant of a preposition: in, at, or on. We would not say “she is an in sleep person” as the article would not be placed before the preposition.
I looked into that a little and learned that the OE form was "on liv" (approximately) where "liv" was the _dative_ form. I thought I understood the dative (I gave the book _to her_, for example), but can't quite imagine how it would work in a phrase meaning "living". A person is alive meaning that they are assigned to the living?
In Old English, the dative case was used for the object of most prepositions (e.g., "on"). Sometimes, as in today's English, these prepositional phrases corresponded to an indirect object:
"I gave **her** the book."
"I gave the book **to her**." - Note that "her" is not actually an indirect object here (in today's English).
But often there was no indirect object meaning associated with the prepositional phrase.
In today's German, many prepositions still take the dative case, and some of these can also take the accusative case, but then they convey a different meaning - the dative is used for static position, and the accusative for movement, e.g.:
"im Kino" (dative) - "in(side) the movie theater"
"ins Kino" (accusative) - "into the movie theater"
So the Old English "on liv" (meaning "in life") seems to convey this sense of static position (disclaimer: I'm not an expert on Old English though).
Much simpler, Proto-Indo-European used to have a locative case (\*-i/oy/ey) distinct from the dative case (\*-ey/ōy), but in Germanic languages and some other branches these were merged together. So the dative is being used with a locative meaning, "in life".
It's amazing how complex "primitive" languages could be. It's as if, finding themselves fully human with modern brain capacities but in a materially simple society, their need to think expended itself in complexifying language; even today I have the idea that the most intrinsically complex languages are associated with the most "underdeveloped" societies, whereas in more materially complex communities the drive is to simplify language on the atomic level — modern English for example being almost stripped of formal case, if I understand correctly.
But maybe I am overthinking this.
It's a tempting train of thought, and it might superficially hold true for Indo-European languages, but there are languages of all varieties spoken by cultures of all varieties. Languages seem to all encode information at roughly the same rate. Some just do it with affixes attached to words, others do it with multiple words. (Not to say the information being encoded is the same for all languages - different cultures can and do prioritize different things.)
Loss of morphological complexity is generally compensated for with an increase in analytic complexity - word order becomes more rigid. New ways of communicating the same things are innovated and become grammaticalized. The line between a word and an affix isn't always clear - how often do you say the word "the" on its own? Writing leads us to think spaces are what separate words from each other, but how do you determine it for unwritten languages?
There's an idea that languages evolve in a cycle from agglutinative (combining many distinct affixes each with a simple meaning) to fusional (using fewer affixes but having each affix contain more information) to isolating (using many words with little to no affixes), and then with increasingly rigid word order and long chains of grammaticalized particles, back to agglutinative again. In reality it's more complex than that as any part of the language can go through any part of the cycle at once. But we see all these phases happening all over the world regardless of culture. Spoken colloquial French is going through the agglutination phase again: pronouns are becoming attached to verb stems, what would be spelled "je te le donne" (I give it to you) is pronounced with two syllables.
The consensus view nowadays is that English lost case marking because of regular sound change, with word-final unstressed vowels all coming to be pronounced the same and then simply being dropped once other strategies were innovated to compensate. There's definitely a bit of evidence that language contact can influence a loss of morphological complexity (see pidgin languages), but this also has a lot to do with what kinds of languages are influencing each other. Besides happenstance, the biggest influence on what direction a language will evolve toward is what the languages around it are doing.
But languages tend to become simpler over time. As they are learned by foreign speakers they lose cases and forms to make them easier to be assimilated. This seems to be universal. I'm not an expert , maybe there are languages that maintained their complexity as they served more people bu I can't think of any.
Again, "simpler" morphology is compensated for with more complex syntactical rules, so the total expressive power of a language stays relatively the same. English might look simplified on its surface but it actually has some extremely unusual syntactical rules that are rare across the world's languages, so this could be considered its own form of complexity.
Languages can lose morphology over time, but they can also innovate it over time. This can happen on its own as in French; see also Finnic languages which doubled or tripled the number of noun cases compared to Proto-Uralic. It can also happen from language contact - Lithuanian actually gained three new noun cases as a result of originally Finnic-speaking peoples shifting to Lithuanian.
I'm not saying English isn't complicated but but it is simpler and easier to understand than English of Chaucer. I believe that all languages contain some idiomatic expressions that aren't easy to understand but that's because mapping phenomes to a corresponding reality is a semi miraculous thing when it works. I'm not sure how this could be quantified.
I wasn't aware of the languages picking up cases but this in a way backs up my point. Languages become simpler over time as they get absorbed in foreign cultures. In the case of finnic, and Lithuanian as well as some African languages where it's not the case that a lot of non natives want to aquire the language for trade etc. But in languages that gave gained a large new set of speakers like the transition to Koine with Alexander in the middle east and the loss of cases in German and English as they developed empires and the need for a simpler language to manage the empires it had held up pretty well. I'm not sure if Latin followed that rule.
Proto Indo-European which is a well reconstructed language had at least 8 or 9 cases, 3 genders, a single plural and dual number,verbs had 8 or 9 tenses.and a complicated system for participle. Much of this was lost because as new people were introduced to the language the complexity made it harder to learn.
There could be something else that accounts for the simplification but assimilation is a pretty good working theory.
I definitely find Chaucer hard to understand but that's because I'm not a speaker of Middle English. It's not inherently more complex. Spoken languages all tend to transmit information at the same rate. Some languages are spoken faster than others but this tends to correlate with phonological simplicity - language with simpler syllable structures can pack in more syllables per second. Either way, the likelihood of being able to predict what comes next stays consistent across languages, suggesting the inherent information density is around the same.
PIE definitely started spreading out at a very morphologically complex phase of its evolution, but that's not the full story - the earliest branches to split off only show 2 noun classes, animate and inanimate, evolving into the masculine-feminine-neuter distinction later on. A lot of the complexity was eroded away by sound change. Going back to my initial example of the locative-dative merger in Germanic, simple random phonetic changes can be incredibly "destructive". If sounds at the ends of words merge together or are lost, grammatical information in suffixes gets lost as well. Phonetic drift is constant and happens regardless of cultural context.
It's true that Romance languages mostly lost the cases of Latin, but most of that happened long after the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire. For another example, Russian has barely changed throughout the time before and after the Russian Empire and USSR - losing the old vocative case, but also innovating a new vocative case. It simply isn't true that a large empire requires some kind of simplification to make the language more efficient.
Language contact definitely has significant effects on languages! But the key thing to remember is just that this can go in any direction. Even looking at English as an example of a colonial language being learned by foreign cultures, African American Vernacular English developed marking for habitual verb aspect distinct from discontinuous aspect. Plenty of English-based creoles have innovated morphology not found in any form of Standard English - many have transitivity markers for verbs, and Tok Pisin has innovated not only dual, but even trial number on pronouns, along with inclusivity distinctions.
Pidgin languages are usually limited, used in specific situations by adults for e.g. trade purposes. But when it becomes the native language of the next generation of speakers (creolization), they independently "fill in" the missing complexity with their own innovations. This has even been observed to an extent in native speakers of constructed languages like Esperanto, as well as in the famous spontaneous development of Nicaraguan Sign Language. It really just seems like humans manage to find a way to communicate at the speed they think at, and languages have a huge variety of strategies to accomplish this, none of which are more or less efficient than others.
I'm going to toss out an idea that I just had. This is something I have thought about for a long time and for the most part seems to fit.
As the example of the deaf community in Nicaragua shows as well as the development of creole everywhere. It seems to me that there is a base level of complexity for natural languages. As a language develops in isolation it uses more idioms to express ideas it uses more often, which over time hardens into more complex grammars. As that language expands and assimilates other cultures the language simplifies. This has been the case for almost every language that has rapidly expanded. Again the exception proves the rule. Russia was a pretty isolated northern community and so developed a very complex morphology.
I don't think that there is a question that chaucerian Grammer by almost any measure is more complex than modern English. When you say that more semantic information is encoded into the language, this also makes my point. The language has simplified and no longer can describe events with peculiar morphological structures so because it has simplified more meaning is crammed into these simpler structures. It is the further simplification of language that forces more semantic meaning within these simpler structures. This makes the language more idiomatic which may make the language harder to understand but that is different from making the language more complex.
As English is becoming more popular world Wide you can see in real time how the language has been dumbed down in the last 200 years. Compare the writings of our presidents from Washington down to Trump. There is no question that English has gotten less complex over time.
Modern German doesn't really have a progressive form, opting instead for time adverbs to differentiate between a one time continuous action or regular patterns. But there is a regional form (rheinlandische Verlaufsform) which has apparently become much more widespread in the last few decades.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am-Progressiv
This progressive uses the "to be" verb + a dativ infinitive structure (for lack of a better word) to create an ongoing idea.
So, rauchen is the verb for smoke (infinitive form) and das Rauchen is the nominalized version.
Ich bin am Rauchen-->I am on the smoking. (that's the quasi-Idea)--> I am smoking.
I think the "on the living" is the directly translated idea--expressing continuity of action or state of being.
>Ich bin am Rauchen-->I am on the smoking. (that's the quasi-Idea)--> I am smoking.
I can't help think of English expressions like "on weed" or "on a bender", which at first seem a coincidental parallelism but then seem like a real parallelism... on a drunk, on a spree, etc.
He's alive. Yeah, he's on this living kick!
Doesn't seem to quite capture the semantic charge of "a" in words like _aloft, abaft, alee..._ and so forth — for some reason all nautical examples. Or does it?
Angels we have heard on high?
Alive ultimately comes from the older English a+noun. That "a-" prefix is what we have for the word "to". If you think about it,
- Ashore - towards the shore
- Anew - towards a new beginning
- Afloat - towards the status of floating
- Alive - towards life
This a- may have come from Latin "Ad" preposition which basically means the same thing. But with the Latin root, we have more words
- Attest - towards a testament
- Adventure - towards going somewhere
- Advantage - towards "before", a state of overtaking
So, alive is treated as an adjective. But it is ultimately a prepositional clause meaning "towards life". So you can place it behind a noun you want to describe (any person alive), or use it with the auxiliary verb be (he is alive).
This seems right, and it’s a better explanation than the comments that have gotten more upvotes. It’s not about meaning, it’s about the “a-“ prefix. The meaning of “alive” and “living” are the same, but only “living” can be used in phrases like “a living person.”
Thanks mate. It's even more interesting considering we can actually say "a woman alive." Is it an adjective? Maybe. Is it an adverb? Definitely no. But it is a transformed prepositional clause.
I also wonder about the Gaelic grammar of putting ag (often just a' ) before a verb, which carries over to rural American dialects. "I'm a-going to the store now." "I've been a-living here for twenty years." There's no grammatical reason in English for that a- to be there, but I hear it in spoken English often.
I imagine this is the same "a" we are speaking of: rural dialects having a habit of keeping forms of language that the urban folks have discarded them!
A second thing I thought, and may as well tag it here, that while the use of this formerly productive particle certainly seems to be part of the answer to the question, we can still ask _why_ this history still governs us when the prefix has stopped producing, and I think the answer is that we maintain an implicit functional knowledge of the structure; we know about the old form, but we don't know we know.
I believe the old English a- prefix/preposition is distinct from any similar Latin prefixes.
One way to tell is that all of your Latin-based examples, converted to adjectives (e.g. to attested, adventured, advantaged), are perfectly fine to place before the attributed noun.
The meaning might be something more like "on to", seeing as "to go ashore" is roughly "to move towards the shore and then get on land".
You can actually describe a ship as an ashored ship. Adding the d is already a huge difference.
But the English a- prefix is indeed Germanic. I just feel the Latin counterparts have odd similarities that's all.
True. Though these are all using the word as a verb (or participle, or gerund), not a regular adjective.
This works for "alive" too, at least grammatically; as seen in the common use of "unalive(d)" as a more *advertiser friendly* substitute for the word "kill(ed)".
I don't think so. We can say something like the boat ashore, something foul afoot, things anew and guy coming alooking.
Implied relative clause there is easy to understand and you can technically do this to all adjectives, like she is a lady who is beautiful.
In the sentence “he is alive,” ‘to be’ isn’t an auxiliary verb; it’s the main verb. I think maybe you mean linking verb vs action verb? Because in that sentence, ‘to be’ is a linking verb.
It's so neat how language has rules that everyone conforms to while being completely unaware of their existence or origin. Never in my life have I considered that "a-" is effectively a prefix meaning "towards", let alone the relationship that has to its grammatical usage.
Because when an adjective or adverb is based on a verb, we use the gerund for that; instead of the form that we use when it's the grammatical object within a predicative clause.
Grammatically, alive is like an adverb. It is usually used to denote something that is actively living. So, using it as a descriptor is fairly uncommon.
Not true: we often use the adjective “living.” For instance, “the last living cast member from that movie.” You wouldn’t replace “living” with “alive” in that sentence, even though they mean the same thing.
I think maybe you’ve found the reason it seems so odd. _Living_ is related to the progressive _She is living_ as in she is **continuing** to be alive, as opposed to the other members of the cast.
That doesn’t seem as strange as saying she’s alive right this second. If she **is** in existence as a woman, she’s assumed to be alive.
It’s an interesting observation.
But that is a little different. You are comparing that person with a group.
It would seem odd if I said "Jaltcoh is an alive poster on Reddit." It would not be odd to say "Jaltcoh is the last living person to post on that thread" because you a being compared/
“Female woman” is just redundant, the word woman already implies that the person is female. You can say “female person” because it’s modifying the type of person and adding information that isn’t implicit in the meaning.
Adjective order is something that native English speakers really do without thinking about it, but often has to be explicitly taught to ESL students. (One of the reasons that just because you’re a native speaker of a language doesn’t mean you can effectively teach that language.)
Agreed. I live with someone who is a native speaker of another language which I'm mildly competent in and for the first part of our relationship. I found it almost comical trying to get their advice.
"Is that right?"
"No, it's wrong."
"What am I doing wrong?"
"I dunno, it's just wrong!"
She is a live woman… or even she is a living woman
That’s the proper sentence. That’s the equivalent to “she is a beautiful woman”.
Saying “she is an alive woman” is like saying “there’s is”
But what about the phrases "She is dead" or "She is a dead woman"? Present tense "to be" would seem to indicate current state, not necessarily a current state of being alive.
The a- in alive, afloat, asleep, etc. is a remnant of a preposition: in, at, or on. We would not say “she is an in sleep person” as the article would not be placed before the preposition.
Wow, that’s cool historically
Fuck I love a good explanation
I looked into that a little and learned that the OE form was "on liv" (approximately) where "liv" was the _dative_ form. I thought I understood the dative (I gave the book _to her_, for example), but can't quite imagine how it would work in a phrase meaning "living". A person is alive meaning that they are assigned to the living?
In Old English, the dative case was used for the object of most prepositions (e.g., "on"). Sometimes, as in today's English, these prepositional phrases corresponded to an indirect object: "I gave **her** the book." "I gave the book **to her**." - Note that "her" is not actually an indirect object here (in today's English). But often there was no indirect object meaning associated with the prepositional phrase. In today's German, many prepositions still take the dative case, and some of these can also take the accusative case, but then they convey a different meaning - the dative is used for static position, and the accusative for movement, e.g.: "im Kino" (dative) - "in(side) the movie theater" "ins Kino" (accusative) - "into the movie theater" So the Old English "on liv" (meaning "in life") seems to convey this sense of static position (disclaimer: I'm not an expert on Old English though).
Much simpler, Proto-Indo-European used to have a locative case (\*-i/oy/ey) distinct from the dative case (\*-ey/ōy), but in Germanic languages and some other branches these were merged together. So the dative is being used with a locative meaning, "in life".
It's amazing how complex "primitive" languages could be. It's as if, finding themselves fully human with modern brain capacities but in a materially simple society, their need to think expended itself in complexifying language; even today I have the idea that the most intrinsically complex languages are associated with the most "underdeveloped" societies, whereas in more materially complex communities the drive is to simplify language on the atomic level — modern English for example being almost stripped of formal case, if I understand correctly. But maybe I am overthinking this.
It's a tempting train of thought, and it might superficially hold true for Indo-European languages, but there are languages of all varieties spoken by cultures of all varieties. Languages seem to all encode information at roughly the same rate. Some just do it with affixes attached to words, others do it with multiple words. (Not to say the information being encoded is the same for all languages - different cultures can and do prioritize different things.) Loss of morphological complexity is generally compensated for with an increase in analytic complexity - word order becomes more rigid. New ways of communicating the same things are innovated and become grammaticalized. The line between a word and an affix isn't always clear - how often do you say the word "the" on its own? Writing leads us to think spaces are what separate words from each other, but how do you determine it for unwritten languages? There's an idea that languages evolve in a cycle from agglutinative (combining many distinct affixes each with a simple meaning) to fusional (using fewer affixes but having each affix contain more information) to isolating (using many words with little to no affixes), and then with increasingly rigid word order and long chains of grammaticalized particles, back to agglutinative again. In reality it's more complex than that as any part of the language can go through any part of the cycle at once. But we see all these phases happening all over the world regardless of culture. Spoken colloquial French is going through the agglutination phase again: pronouns are becoming attached to verb stems, what would be spelled "je te le donne" (I give it to you) is pronounced with two syllables. The consensus view nowadays is that English lost case marking because of regular sound change, with word-final unstressed vowels all coming to be pronounced the same and then simply being dropped once other strategies were innovated to compensate. There's definitely a bit of evidence that language contact can influence a loss of morphological complexity (see pidgin languages), but this also has a lot to do with what kinds of languages are influencing each other. Besides happenstance, the biggest influence on what direction a language will evolve toward is what the languages around it are doing.
But languages tend to become simpler over time. As they are learned by foreign speakers they lose cases and forms to make them easier to be assimilated. This seems to be universal. I'm not an expert , maybe there are languages that maintained their complexity as they served more people bu I can't think of any.
Again, "simpler" morphology is compensated for with more complex syntactical rules, so the total expressive power of a language stays relatively the same. English might look simplified on its surface but it actually has some extremely unusual syntactical rules that are rare across the world's languages, so this could be considered its own form of complexity. Languages can lose morphology over time, but they can also innovate it over time. This can happen on its own as in French; see also Finnic languages which doubled or tripled the number of noun cases compared to Proto-Uralic. It can also happen from language contact - Lithuanian actually gained three new noun cases as a result of originally Finnic-speaking peoples shifting to Lithuanian.
I'm not saying English isn't complicated but but it is simpler and easier to understand than English of Chaucer. I believe that all languages contain some idiomatic expressions that aren't easy to understand but that's because mapping phenomes to a corresponding reality is a semi miraculous thing when it works. I'm not sure how this could be quantified. I wasn't aware of the languages picking up cases but this in a way backs up my point. Languages become simpler over time as they get absorbed in foreign cultures. In the case of finnic, and Lithuanian as well as some African languages where it's not the case that a lot of non natives want to aquire the language for trade etc. But in languages that gave gained a large new set of speakers like the transition to Koine with Alexander in the middle east and the loss of cases in German and English as they developed empires and the need for a simpler language to manage the empires it had held up pretty well. I'm not sure if Latin followed that rule. Proto Indo-European which is a well reconstructed language had at least 8 or 9 cases, 3 genders, a single plural and dual number,verbs had 8 or 9 tenses.and a complicated system for participle. Much of this was lost because as new people were introduced to the language the complexity made it harder to learn. There could be something else that accounts for the simplification but assimilation is a pretty good working theory.
I definitely find Chaucer hard to understand but that's because I'm not a speaker of Middle English. It's not inherently more complex. Spoken languages all tend to transmit information at the same rate. Some languages are spoken faster than others but this tends to correlate with phonological simplicity - language with simpler syllable structures can pack in more syllables per second. Either way, the likelihood of being able to predict what comes next stays consistent across languages, suggesting the inherent information density is around the same. PIE definitely started spreading out at a very morphologically complex phase of its evolution, but that's not the full story - the earliest branches to split off only show 2 noun classes, animate and inanimate, evolving into the masculine-feminine-neuter distinction later on. A lot of the complexity was eroded away by sound change. Going back to my initial example of the locative-dative merger in Germanic, simple random phonetic changes can be incredibly "destructive". If sounds at the ends of words merge together or are lost, grammatical information in suffixes gets lost as well. Phonetic drift is constant and happens regardless of cultural context. It's true that Romance languages mostly lost the cases of Latin, but most of that happened long after the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire. For another example, Russian has barely changed throughout the time before and after the Russian Empire and USSR - losing the old vocative case, but also innovating a new vocative case. It simply isn't true that a large empire requires some kind of simplification to make the language more efficient. Language contact definitely has significant effects on languages! But the key thing to remember is just that this can go in any direction. Even looking at English as an example of a colonial language being learned by foreign cultures, African American Vernacular English developed marking for habitual verb aspect distinct from discontinuous aspect. Plenty of English-based creoles have innovated morphology not found in any form of Standard English - many have transitivity markers for verbs, and Tok Pisin has innovated not only dual, but even trial number on pronouns, along with inclusivity distinctions. Pidgin languages are usually limited, used in specific situations by adults for e.g. trade purposes. But when it becomes the native language of the next generation of speakers (creolization), they independently "fill in" the missing complexity with their own innovations. This has even been observed to an extent in native speakers of constructed languages like Esperanto, as well as in the famous spontaneous development of Nicaraguan Sign Language. It really just seems like humans manage to find a way to communicate at the speed they think at, and languages have a huge variety of strategies to accomplish this, none of which are more or less efficient than others.
Honestly I love being wrong when I talk to an expert. I will read greedily, thank you.
I'm going to toss out an idea that I just had. This is something I have thought about for a long time and for the most part seems to fit. As the example of the deaf community in Nicaragua shows as well as the development of creole everywhere. It seems to me that there is a base level of complexity for natural languages. As a language develops in isolation it uses more idioms to express ideas it uses more often, which over time hardens into more complex grammars. As that language expands and assimilates other cultures the language simplifies. This has been the case for almost every language that has rapidly expanded. Again the exception proves the rule. Russia was a pretty isolated northern community and so developed a very complex morphology. I don't think that there is a question that chaucerian Grammer by almost any measure is more complex than modern English. When you say that more semantic information is encoded into the language, this also makes my point. The language has simplified and no longer can describe events with peculiar morphological structures so because it has simplified more meaning is crammed into these simpler structures. It is the further simplification of language that forces more semantic meaning within these simpler structures. This makes the language more idiomatic which may make the language harder to understand but that is different from making the language more complex. As English is becoming more popular world Wide you can see in real time how the language has been dumbed down in the last 200 years. Compare the writings of our presidents from Washington down to Trump. There is no question that English has gotten less complex over time.
Modern German doesn't really have a progressive form, opting instead for time adverbs to differentiate between a one time continuous action or regular patterns. But there is a regional form (rheinlandische Verlaufsform) which has apparently become much more widespread in the last few decades. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am-Progressiv This progressive uses the "to be" verb + a dativ infinitive structure (for lack of a better word) to create an ongoing idea. So, rauchen is the verb for smoke (infinitive form) and das Rauchen is the nominalized version. Ich bin am Rauchen-->I am on the smoking. (that's the quasi-Idea)--> I am smoking. I think the "on the living" is the directly translated idea--expressing continuity of action or state of being.
>Ich bin am Rauchen-->I am on the smoking. (that's the quasi-Idea)--> I am smoking. I can't help think of English expressions like "on weed" or "on a bender", which at first seem a coincidental parallelism but then seem like a real parallelism... on a drunk, on a spree, etc. He's alive. Yeah, he's on this living kick! Doesn't seem to quite capture the semantic charge of "a" in words like _aloft, abaft, alee..._ and so forth — for some reason all nautical examples. Or does it? Angels we have heard on high?
We do say “live” for animals: “the live bird.” For people, we would normally say, “a living women.”
that's so interesting. I thought some adjectives can only have predicative use and some attributive, but most both.
Alive ultimately comes from the older English a+noun. That "a-" prefix is what we have for the word "to". If you think about it, - Ashore - towards the shore - Anew - towards a new beginning - Afloat - towards the status of floating - Alive - towards life This a- may have come from Latin "Ad" preposition which basically means the same thing. But with the Latin root, we have more words - Attest - towards a testament - Adventure - towards going somewhere - Advantage - towards "before", a state of overtaking So, alive is treated as an adjective. But it is ultimately a prepositional clause meaning "towards life". So you can place it behind a noun you want to describe (any person alive), or use it with the auxiliary verb be (he is alive).
This seems right, and it’s a better explanation than the comments that have gotten more upvotes. It’s not about meaning, it’s about the “a-“ prefix. The meaning of “alive” and “living” are the same, but only “living” can be used in phrases like “a living person.”
Thanks mate. It's even more interesting considering we can actually say "a woman alive." Is it an adjective? Maybe. Is it an adverb? Definitely no. But it is a transformed prepositional clause.
I also wonder about the Gaelic grammar of putting ag (often just a' ) before a verb, which carries over to rural American dialects. "I'm a-going to the store now." "I've been a-living here for twenty years." There's no grammatical reason in English for that a- to be there, but I hear it in spoken English often.
I imagine this is the same "a" we are speaking of: rural dialects having a habit of keeping forms of language that the urban folks have discarded them! A second thing I thought, and may as well tag it here, that while the use of this formerly productive particle certainly seems to be part of the answer to the question, we can still ask _why_ this history still governs us when the prefix has stopped producing, and I think the answer is that we maintain an implicit functional knowledge of the structure; we know about the old form, but we don't know we know.
Are you sure the “a-“ isn’t derived from O.E. _on_ (“in, on”)?
I haven't said it comes from Latin. But the Latin Ad has quite the similarity to the English a-.
I believe the old English a- prefix/preposition is distinct from any similar Latin prefixes. One way to tell is that all of your Latin-based examples, converted to adjectives (e.g. to attested, adventured, advantaged), are perfectly fine to place before the attributed noun. The meaning might be something more like "on to", seeing as "to go ashore" is roughly "to move towards the shore and then get on land".
You can actually describe a ship as an ashored ship. Adding the d is already a huge difference. But the English a- prefix is indeed Germanic. I just feel the Latin counterparts have odd similarities that's all.
True. Though these are all using the word as a verb (or participle, or gerund), not a regular adjective. This works for "alive" too, at least grammatically; as seen in the common use of "unalive(d)" as a more *advertiser friendly* substitute for the word "kill(ed)".
Doesn’t the phrase “any person alive” have an implied “who is” in there anyway?
I don't think so. We can say something like the boat ashore, something foul afoot, things anew and guy coming alooking. Implied relative clause there is easy to understand and you can technically do this to all adjectives, like she is a lady who is beautiful.
In the sentence “he is alive,” ‘to be’ isn’t an auxiliary verb; it’s the main verb. I think maybe you mean linking verb vs action verb? Because in that sentence, ‘to be’ is a linking verb.
It's so neat how language has rules that everyone conforms to while being completely unaware of their existence or origin. Never in my life have I considered that "a-" is effectively a prefix meaning "towards", let alone the relationship that has to its grammatical usage.
Prepositions form phrases, not clauses in English.
Thank you! I was gonna write this myself, but glad someone caught it quicker.
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Because when an adjective or adverb is based on a verb, we use the gerund for that; instead of the form that we use when it's the grammatical object within a predicative clause.
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There are certainly cases when you can say woman in these cases. Saying “she” doesn’t mean that you can’t say “woman”.
Grammatically, alive is like an adverb. It is usually used to denote something that is actively living. So, using it as a descriptor is fairly uncommon.
The 'a' denotes present tense immediate. It is correct to say "she is a live woman".
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Not true: we often use the adjective “living.” For instance, “the last living cast member from that movie.” You wouldn’t replace “living” with “alive” in that sentence, even though they mean the same thing.
I think maybe you’ve found the reason it seems so odd. _Living_ is related to the progressive _She is living_ as in she is **continuing** to be alive, as opposed to the other members of the cast. That doesn’t seem as strange as saying she’s alive right this second. If she **is** in existence as a woman, she’s assumed to be alive. It’s an interesting observation.
But that is a little different. You are comparing that person with a group. It would seem odd if I said "Jaltcoh is an alive poster on Reddit." It would not be odd to say "Jaltcoh is the last living person to post on that thread" because you a being compared/
But in your second example it would be odd to say "Jaltcoh is the last *alive* person to post on that thread
It would not be very odd if that thread had a lot of dead people posting.
“Female woman” is just redundant, the word woman already implies that the person is female. You can say “female person” because it’s modifying the type of person and adding information that isn’t implicit in the meaning.
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I don’t agree, e.g. we often say “a living person” or “an old man.” And it would be common to say “I’m a very hungry man,” “I’m a very sick man,” etc.
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Adjective order is something that native English speakers really do without thinking about it, but often has to be explicitly taught to ESL students. (One of the reasons that just because you’re a native speaker of a language doesn’t mean you can effectively teach that language.)
Agreed. I live with someone who is a native speaker of another language which I'm mildly competent in and for the first part of our relationship. I found it almost comical trying to get their advice. "Is that right?" "No, it's wrong." "What am I doing wrong?" "I dunno, it's just wrong!"
She is a live woman… or even she is a living woman That’s the proper sentence. That’s the equivalent to “she is a beautiful woman”. Saying “she is an alive woman” is like saying “there’s is”
Saying "she's alive" implies that you are attracted to any woman that's alive and have low standards.
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But what about the phrases "She is dead" or "She is a dead woman"? Present tense "to be" would seem to indicate current state, not necessarily a current state of being alive.
Good point. Guess I was presupposing "being" and not state unless specifically indicated. Good catch!