“The times they are a-changin” - B. Dylan
“I have my ship, and all my flags are a-flying” - S. Stills
“The frog he would a-wooing go” - Anon
What do you call the above construction – prefixing “a-” to a verb?
Where does it come from?
It doesn’t change the meaning at all: “The times they are changing” means exactly the same thing. (It does seem to give an archaic flavor to the phrase.) So when and why do writers decide to use it?
Presumably to keep the cadence a-flowing smoothly. Read them without the “a-” and they sound sort of stilted.
I think that the a- prefix used to be standard for gerunds, in an older version of English, but fell out of use for most situations.
Yeah – If I’m not mistaken, Late Middle English or Early Modern English cognate to ge- in German, descended more directly from Old English y-, as in “Sumer is y-comen in; lhude singe cuckoo.”
Really? I had thought that the y- prefix was past tense, as in “and the yonge sonne hath in the ram his halve course yronne”. The Sun isn’t running half of Aries; it already has run half of Aries.
Oh, and I’m reasonably sure that your example is Middle English, not Old English, since it’s mostly intelligible to me.
For present participles, not for gerunds, although the two have the same form in modern English.
If you think of a participle as an adjectival form of a verb, the “a-” prefix is performing a similar function to that seen in forms like “awake”, “asleep”, “alive”, “afloat”.
You are correct that Polycarp’s example is a past participle, not a present participle.
“La La La La La.” I can’t hear you… Didn’t like that stuff back then, don’t like it now… :eek:
You guys are right about my propensity to participlalize improperly.
Thank goodness it was you saying that and not, say, Daffy Duck.
How do you know he isn’t?