The Loom Of Language

386 The Loom of Laiigu&ge
FRENCH PORTUGUESE SPANISH
There is or are il y a ha hay (ha + y)
There was or were il y avait havia habia
There will be il y aura havera habra
There has (or have) been il y a eu tern havido ha habido
Besides denoting possession and indicating time, our own verb have
expresses necessity, as m we have to eat before we can philosophize So
also, the French for have to is avoir a, the Spanish haber de3 or (more
emphatically) tener que, followed by the infinitive, e g
I have to go out = fai a sortir = he de (or tengo que) sahr
What is called the complete conjugation of esse, like that of our own
verb to be3 includes derivatives of several different roots In Vulgar
Latin state (to stand) shared some of the territory of esse. Though the
French etie and the Itahan esseie are mainly offspring of esse, some of
their parts come from stare The Itahan essete^ like its Latin parent,
keeps company with the past participle in passive constructions, e g
tlfanciuttofu lavato (the child was washed). In French also it is possible
to write tl est aime de tout le monde (he is loved by everybody); but
such passive expressions rarely turn up in daily speech. It is more usual
to rely upon.
(a) a reflexive construction, eg la propnete se vendra samedi (the
property will be sold on Saturday)
(b) an impersonal expression involving the use of on, eg on rappone
de Moscou que (one reports from Moscow that = it is reported
from Moscow that)
The French-Italian verb to be has an auxiliary use comparable to that
of its Teutonic equivalent That is to say,, it takes the place of to have
in compound past tenses if the verb is leflexwe or if it is intransitive
(especially if it expresses motion)
Englisht / washed without soap we arrived too late
French • Je me suis lave sans savon nous sommes arnve's trop tard
Itahan. Mi sono lavato senza sapone siamo arrivati troppo tardi
The Latin and Itahan verb stare survives m Spanish and Portuguese
as ESTAR The latter is equivalent to our veib to bem three situations,
one of which calls for more detailed treatment, Spanish examples will
suffice to illustrate the other two, viz.
(a) when our be signifies location, ownership, profession, e g
Budapest esta en Hungria