Does anybody know the history of verbal nouns? I was wondering why only the Celtic languages have them.

Sincerely,

Swisscheese

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Irish Gaelic Tutor
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I think they developed in PIE and spread out from there.

They are not confined to Celtic languages. In English they're called gerunds, I think.

ha, actually you may be on to something. I know in logic, the copula functions just like the copula in Irish when connecting two nouns together. I wonder if the verbal noun has some connection to logic as well.

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Irish Gaelic Tutor
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Wikipedia has an article on verbal nouns, which do occur in non-Celtic languages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verbal_noun

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I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.

Ha, that tells ya how much I payed attention to Grammar when I was younger. Good to know :}.

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Irish Gaelic Tutor
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But as far as I known the Celtic languages are the only Indo-European languages that have verbal nouns instead of infinitives, and no infinitives. I mean, real verbal nouns, the English gerunds are different, and anyway the English verbs have infinitives, the Slavic languages have infinitives, the Celtic languages don't. Well, the Brythonic verbal nouns now work more or less as infinitives nowadays, most of the time (they aren't really declinable nouns etc as the Gaelic ones are), but once they were real nouns.

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne

Yes, there is no infinitive in Irish, but I suppose it has to do with definitions and how narrowly you interpret them. Every language has developed its own way of expressing the same thing.
Verbal nouns do occur in many different languages, from Arabic to Japanese. Of course their precise structure and usage are not the same in the disparate languages, but they do have enough in common to be put in the same classification.
The danger is always getting too tangled up in the nomenclature rather than the actual usage…infinitive, verbal noun, gerund,…how many people think about which to use in a sentence, and once they've used them, do they think "Ah no! I used a gerund in place of a present participle just then. I certainly hope no-one noticed."

but there are specific ways to define what is a verbal noun and what is an infinitive.
For example, the object of a verbal noun is in the genitive ; the object of an infinitive normally is in the accusative (when it exists).
Verbal nouns can be declined, you can put an article before, etc. Infinitives don't change like that, they are more verbs than nouns.

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne

English has verbal nouns too, apart from the gerunds: things like destruction, betrayal, disappearance, and so forth. Like regular verbs they can be transitive or intransitive, and the transitive ones can take direct objects, but because they're nouns their subjects are usually marked with ’s and their objects are marked with of (the barbarians’ destruction of the city; John’s betrayal of Mary’s trust; Madeleine’s disappearance etc.). But in English, not all verbs have verbal nouns that are distinct from gerunds. Although run can be used as a noun in I went for a run, it's not a verbal noun because all you can put in Peter’s ____ of the race is running, not run.

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But there aren't really verbal nouns and anyway, once again, the difference is that the Celtic languages have no infinitives, only verbal nouns.

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne