2009/6/6 Tim Morley <[email protected]>:
> /me arrives two days late to the party, with grammar nazi hat on to
> boot, but anyways...
>
> "were" isn't a participle, past or otherwise. It's a verb. An
> auxiliary verb, if you like, but a fully fledged verb nonetheless.
>
Well "were" and "was" are cognates the -s- becoming -z- by Verner's
Law and then later rhotacized to -r-, the so-called Grammatischer
Wechsel. Both quite happily preterite forms of the verb "to be" and
you can't get much more of a core verb than that. Of course a
participle is also a verb too, just not a finite one and damn useful
things they are sometimes.
The confusion may be that "were" is also used in non-indicative
sentences ("if I were a rich man") showing its descent from the OE
subjunctive waere ("ae" being an ash rendered in ASCII).
Apologies for the historical linguistics. I find it hard to remember
anything unsystematic, so I have to construct some *reason* for things
being the way they are. Historical linguistics made learning some
languages a teeny bit less awful, though not nearly enough.
--
Francis Davey
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