Category talk:Afrikaans irregular verbs

I've added the verbs baar, trou, skei, oorly, and sterf to the list because they have irregular participle constructions alongside regular ones. Most grammars don't consider these to be irregular. For example, Donaldson in his "Grammar of Afrikaans" (p. 236) considers "is oorlede" to be only "historically" a perfect tense. His argument is that instead of "Hy is gisteraand oorlede", Afrikaans can also say "Hy is gisteraand dood" and therefore "oorlede" is an adjective, not a verb. But it seems more correct, contrariwise, to say that "dood" in the latter sentence is actually verbal. Because the phrase (both with "oorlede" and "dood") describes an event in the past, not a condition, and therefore it can only be perfect. -- Of course, if you all disagree, you can always delete the words from the category. Kolmiel (talk) 15:44, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

I think you've made the right call here. "Hij is gisteravond dood" would be incorrect in Dutch, and with the past tense, "Hij was gisteravond dood", you are describing a state rather than an event. So it's saying "He was dead yesterday" . Of course the implication could be that he died, but that's not set in stone within the sentence, he could have been dead the day before too. With "overleden" on the other hand, it means that he actually died. So it seems that this use of "dood" is indeed verbal and is an innovation in Afrikaans that is not found in Dutch, or at least not standard Dutch. It may exist in certain Dutch dialects, I don't know. —CodeCat 15:49, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. Yours was pretty much my reasoning, too. I'm thinking that "Hy is gisteraand dood" is probably originally an ellipsis for "doodgegaan", even if that verb is now construed with hê. There's also the construction: Ons is huis toe ("We went home"), also an ellipsis with "gegaan". (I think in Dutch you can also say "We zijn naar huis." And at least in German: "Wir sind nach Hause.") Kolmiel (talk) 16:21, 11 March 2016 (UTC)