Q: “What are you doing?” *Q1:
“What do you do?”
A: “I am making tea” *Q2: “I make tea”.
The English present continuous (using
am/is/are + the “ing” form of a verb to indicate that the action is temporary,
unfinished or ongoing) is less of an anomaly than ‘do’ [see We do use ‘do’ a lot in English, don’t we? Why do we do this? below]
. It exists in a few other
European languages (Icelandic, Dutch and Italian) although it is used less
regularly and in different ways. In most of the other European languages the
imperfective/continuous aspect is used only for past tenses and there would be no
difference between the Q/*Q1 and A/*A1 forms above.
In South Asian languages (like Hindi or Tamil) the
use of the present continuous is universal.
HINDI
ham likh rahe hain
we – write – ing – are
We are writing
Speakers from countries such as India
and Sri Lanka tend to overuse it in English because in their own languages it
is used for both action and state verbs. In English it only applies to action verbs -except, of course, in McDonald’s slogans:
In the 14th century or thereabouts a new
present continuous form emerged in Middle English modelled on a Brythonic/Welsh
construction:
mae --- yn --- dysgu
be + preposition + verbal noun
He is learning
This was not simply
the verbal noun/gerund found in other
Germanic languages but clearly included the notion of imperfectivity
(temporary, unfinished and ongoing action) which paralleled an existing
Brythonic usage. British learners of
English may have felt the need to distinguish between perfective and
imperfective aspects and used this construction to do it.
The most common
pattern was the -ing(e) form which spread from the southwest (in the Middle English period) where Celtic contact was strongest.
It looks as if the Old
English –and(e)/-ing(e)/-ende/-inde gerund merged its use with a British
present continuous form to create an all singing -all dancing present
participle which is the modern English ‘-ing’ form.
Old English itself would probably have got no further than the Germanic gerund.
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