I really don't know, either. I never developed sufficient fluency in French to
master them all. But a scan of Yahoo Answers tells me there are 24 verb tenses
in French. It's just that when you're trying to learn them it seems like
thousands. :-)
From: "[email protected] [FairfieldLife]" <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Thursday, December 25, 2014 12:03 AM
Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Tenses in English vs....
The tenses of French, being a romance language, came from the original
Latin.
Are there new French tenses not present in Latin (not knowing, just asking)?
L
---In [email protected], <turquoiseb@...> wrote :
From: "anartaxius@... [FairfieldLife]" <[email protected]>
I think tenses could be reduced for present-centred people.
She is/isn't singing.
Because there is memory and in dealing with life there is the need to
anticipate sometimes, there are two variants:
In memory she is/isn't singing.
In imagination she is/isn't singing hence.
All the other possible tenses are loops in the mind when it creates additional
imaginary states from these three.
Interesting. I haven't thought this through, and am just winging this reply for
the fun of it, but I'm not convinced I could make do with only these three
tenses.
It seems to me that the statement "In memory she is singing" wouldn't be
sufficient because it implies (at least to me) a single "snapshot" of time.
It's like when I hear this construction I imagine myself mentally taking the
"Is she singing?" test engine back to a certain moment in time, turning it on
long enough to determine whether or not she is singing, and then turning it off
again. This is useful for conveying whether or not she is singing, but not so
good for conveying a sense of the song.
A song isn't a snapshot; it's a series of them, heard in sequence. It exists
over time. One of the things I actually like about French and all of its
(seemingly) thousands of verb tenses is that they can be used to imply the
passage of time. Did the event happen *solely* in the past? Or did it start in
the past and continue to the present?
---In [email protected], <LEnglish5@...> wrote :
Many people marvel at all the tenses there are in other languages, but in fact,
medieval scholars revised English to ensure that every Latin tense could be
translated properly to English. You may or may not use them in your daily
language, but they're all there, by design:
How to Translate Verbs
| |
| | How to Translate Verbs Description of Form Latin Form Translation(s)
in English Idiom present imperative active cane! canite! sing! (one of you)
sing! (you all) present indicative active canit | |
| View on www.uvm.edu | Preview by Yahoo |
| |
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