Hebrew has three tenses. Three. That’s it. None of this imperfect or auxiliaries. Past, present, future. That’s it. Future tense can also be used for the imperative.
Alas, Hebrew has many other odd facets to confuse and bewilder the naive student. YMMV.
Interestingly enough, ancient Egyptian is somewhat the same. There is a verb wnn “to be,” but generally, substantival, adjectival, and adverbial sentences are formed nonverbally. I’m not even sure whether those terms for sentence types are the commonly used linguistic ones, as every Middle Egyptian scholar seems to use different terms for the same things, but here are some examples:
Adverbial sentence, expressing circumstance: jw.j m pr “I am in the house,” with m pr meaning “in the house,” jw, an untranslatable particle, and the suffix pronoun j, “I/me/my/mine.” These sentences can also be formed with the particle mk (roughly “Look, dude”) in the place of jw, and in that case, a different pronoun class (dependent) is used.
Substantival sentence, associating one entity with another: ntf nb pr pw “He [is the lord of the house,” ntf being the independent pronoun form of “he,” nb pr meaning “lord of the house,” and pw (pronounced “poo” by Egyptologists, amusingly enough) being a particle roughly equivalent to “it is”/“he is”/“we are”/etc. Pw, however, is left out when the subject of the sentence is in the first or second person. In an interesting parallel to the Russian example, the unexpected use or omission of pw is thought to convey some sort of isolating contrast or emphasis, expressed in English with vocal tone/volume.
Adjectival sentence, expressing property: nfr sw “he is beautiful/good,” with nfr meaning “beautiful/good” and sw being the dependent pronoun for “he/him.” When the subject is in the first person, the substantival sentence form is used: jnk nfr, which seems to literally mean “I am the/a good/beautiful one.”
[that was somewhat of a hijack, but hey, one doesn’t often get a chance to make good use of one’s knowledge of a completely dead language…]
This is a subject of some debate in linguistic circles, and I hope I can manage to explain it correctly. But if I make a mistake, I’m sure someone will correct me. Anyway, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf), also known as the Linguistic Relativity hypothesis, holds that what language we speak has a profound affect on what kind of thoughts we have. If a language does not have a term for a particular concept, it may be difficult or even impossible for a person who speaks only that language to understand the concept.
This hypothesis, at least in its strong form, is no longer in favor in the linguistic community. Most linguists would grant that language has some influence on thought, but few today would say that it actually determines thought or that the thought and the word used to express that thought are inseperable/identical.
I work teaching English to Japanese-speakers, and they do often have trouble learning English grammatical rules that have no close Japanese equivelant. However, they rarely seem puzzled by the ideas, unless they’ve been subjected to an inadequate or confusing explanation. It’s just difficult for them to remember how to properly express these ideas in English.
Actually, it’s even worse than that - what passes for a “present tense” in Hebrew is, grammatically, a noun-form. “I work” is, really, “I am a worker”.
That leaves only two true verb tenses - past and future - and, in order to confuse things completely, these were interchangeable in Biblical (although not in Modern) Hebrew! Some of you will remember from Sunday School all the sentences in the bible starting with “And…” - “And god said, let there be light…”. Well, in the original hebrew, what it says there is “And will say god, let there be light…” - the And prefix renders the future into the past. The opposite also worked in biblical hebrew - “And said you onto them…” really means -“you shall say”.
So, to summarize - Hebrew really has only two tenses, and they were interchangeable by just using a prefix (although this usage HAS died out in Modern Hebrew).
Like the fact that verbs can take up to seven different forms of conjugation, giving them active, causitive, negative, reflexive and several forms of passive meanings, depending on the form used - but that’s a whole new kettle of fish…
Dani
Well, in Icelandic there are just two tenses: The past and present tense.
Icelandic however has six moods: The Indicative is the most common one and is mainly used in statements:
– Hann talar mikið - “he talks much”
– þið lesið bókina - “you read the book”
The Subjunctive is used to express hope, wish or something unreal:
– Þú læsir bókina er þú gætir - “you would read the book if you could”
– Ef ég væri sterkari lemdi ég hann - “if I was stronger I would hit him”
Subjunctive is also used with some conjunctions and in indirect speech:
– Þó hún sofi mikið er hún alltaf þreytt - “though she sleeps much she is always tired”
– Hann sagði að skipið færi á morgun - “he said that the ship would leave tomorrow”
The Imperative is used for commands and normally it is formed by the suffixes -du, -ðu or -tu, but they are derived from the personal pronoun þú “you”:
– Lestu bókina! - “read the book!”
– Komdu strax! - “come immediately!”
– Farðu! - “go!”.
The imperative plural has the same form as indicative and subjunctive:
– Lesið bókina! - “read the book!”
The present participle is formed by the suffix -andi and is uninflected:
– Þú kemur gangandi - “you come walking”
– Sýnið gangandi vegfarendum tillitssemi - “pay attention to walking passers-by”. The past participle is formed with auxiliaries like hafa “have” and geta “can”:
– Ég hef lesið bókina - “I have read the book”
– Ég get lesið bókina - “I can read the book”
In the passive voice the past participle agrees with the nominative subject in gender, number and case:
– Þeir (m. pl. nom) voru handteknir (m. pl. nom.) - “they were arrested”
– Þær (f. pl. nom.) voru handteknar (f. pl. nom.) - “they were arrested”
The Infinitive is formed by the suffix -a:
– Lesa - “to read”, koma - “to come”, skrifa - “to write”.
To make things interesting, nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals are declined for four cases; nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. Words are normally in the nominative unless they are governed by some other word or constituent in the sentence. Prepositions and verbs can assign accusative, dative and genitive and nouns can assign genitive.
So the word “horse” in Icelandic would be hestur, hest, hesti, hests, hesturinn, hestinum or hestsins, depending on the sentence… which should answer the OP’s question… or not - I got a little bit caried away, it seems.
…this has been “Icelandic and you”, tune in again tomorrow for more obscure grammar lessons you didn’t ask for.
German lacks a true differentiation between present (I eat the pants) and present perfect (I am eating the pants). For both, you’d just say “Ich esse die Hose.”
Questions with factual answers belong in General Questions. I’ll move this for you.
Cajun Man
for the SDMB
Well, languages do tend to have some specialized words that fit their culture. I’ve recently bought a book listing 200 Japanese words which do not have English equivalents - or the English equivalents do not have the same connotation - which seems to do a decent job explaining the history behind these concepts in English. I’d say it’s probably a good thing that English doesn’t have a word for karoshi…
This is drifting away from the op, but there are two types of such words: ones that can be easily translated with few words. Karoushi can be addressed easily by “death by exhaustion/overwork”. There are however concepts and constructions that are extremely hard if not impossible to translate. Give a shot at: Sasuga, Cecil Adams da! Or how about the distinction between:
Okutte moratta vs. okutte itadaita vs. okutte kureta vs. okutte kudasatta.
They all translate in English as “(someone) sent it for me”, but the nuances are completely lost in translation. (ha!)
I’m going to mention the concept of “saudade” which is so central to portuguese culture, and which, not only can’t be translated accurately in french (or english, for that matter), but also apparently can’t really be understood by non portuguese-speaking people (at least not by me).
By the way, french, like AFAIK other romance languages has more tenses than english, and I don’t think that lacking, say, the “subjunctive imperfect” prevent english speakers from conveying exactly what they mean. At the contrary, french indeed lacks progressive tenses, like the simple “I was eating when” which must be expressed otherwise, for instance “j’etais en train de manger quand” which litterally would be translated “I was in the process of to eat when” or possibly plainly “je mangeais quand” that I can’t translate litterally since…english is lacking this tense! (which has a broader use than simply expressing incompleted actions in the past).
See Frederick Bodmer’s The Loom of Language, especially Chapter X. It should be available in your public library, or in a large bookstore.
Further, I’d recommend the books of MIT linguist/cognitive specialist Steven Pinker, especially Words and Rules and The Language Instinct.
Lastly, David Crystal’s The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language is an excellent resource on this topic and all matters linguistic.
Sounds exactly like Dublinese. There is also the construction “I am after verbing it”. He’s after telling me a story, I am after eating my dinner, etc.
I don’t know if they are legit variations or just awful grammar. I am fairly sure that “I would’ve lovin’ it!” is just horrible horrible grammar.
This strikes me as an example of a very common type of cultural particularism or mystification. I am prepared to bet that in any particular context, the word saudade can be perfectly adequately rendered in English, whether as “nostalgia”, “wistful longing” or some other phrase. Saudade is no more “untranslateable” than, say, the English word “squeamish”, and there’s nothing in a Portuguese or Brazilian person’s brain that allows him to understand saudade where I cannot, while he is doomed to gape uncomprehendingly at the concept of squeamishness.
My point, such as it is, is that while the target language may lack a word with exactly the same semantic content as the word in the source language, it is always possible to find a good translation in any given context. The only exception I can think of is where a word bears a double meaning in the context, and no equivalent double meaning is available in the target language.
What’s wrong with your own literal translation: “I was eating when …”? As has been pointed out above, English has exactly two tenses, but our lack of a future tense is no obstacle at all to our talking about future time. Similarly for progressive “tenses”.
Iteki, your remark reminds me of the time I was playing Yahtzee (a poker-dice game) with an English chap and his father. The father rolled the dice, started looking at them and said “what am I after?”, to which I replied “you’re after throwing the dice!”
Okay, it was funny at the time.
As my French teacher was very fond of saying, the present tense in French has 3 possible translations in English. For example, the verb manger. Je mange can be translated as-
And I’m pretty sure English has a subjunctive tense, although no one ever uses it. The grammatically correct way to express desire is “I wish I were an Oscar Meyer weiner.” But no one says that anymore.
English does have a subjunctive mood, although it is somewhat moribund. There is a useful distinction between “I wish I were” and “I wish I was”, which is worth maintaining, in my opinion, and so I tend to use it as appropriate. Whether this makes me sound like an affected ass is not really for me to say.
By the way, is there really a difference in meaning between “I eat” and “I do eat” as translations for “je mange”?
Sorry, for the hijack, but : since I discovered that “I do eat” was sometimes used, I assumed, for some reason, that it was more emphatic than “I eat” (more or less similar to : “I eat, really!!”). But you seem to state there’s no real difference. So, was I wrong in my assumption?
Saudade was the word that immediately came to my mind, too. I originally heard it explained as “that feeling you get when you walk into a room and smell a smell and it instantly takes you back to someplace you haven’t been in years”. Which is perfectly understandable to this non-Portuguese speaker, even if it takes me 27 times longer to say it.
Iteki:
Perfectly legit in Hiberno-English. They’re just literal translation from the Irish Tá mé tar éis…
Just for the record, Hungarian doesn’t have a perfect tense either. Although in a lot of situations the concept of an action being complete can be expressed using the verb prefix meg, this is more akin to a phrasal verb in English (for example: enni = to eat, megenni = to eat /sg/ up). The Hungarians seem to get by fine using the aforementioned Runyan method…
That’s present progressive. Present perfect would be “I have eaten the pants.”
I do, and it drives me bonkers when other people don’t. We’ve got a subjunctive, guys, and it has a purpose, so use it!