Ondo:

Luib:Instead of "Li estis dirinta" you can also say "Li dirintis" whith the same meaning. But it seems to be rare (although I personnally use it as much as possible):

Yes, you can say "Li dirintis" if you don't care whether speakers of normal Esperanto will readily understand you or not. Or maybe you just want to show off with your excellent command of the hidden corners of grammar, because you "personnally use it as much as possible".

I agree with this. The only compressed form I actually find worth while using is "-intus". As it is used fairly often, people would understand it.

Vorto kiel legintos enhavas ŝajne tro multe da informoj en tro kunpakita formo.

This is a pretty inane objection, to be honest. The English sentence He'll have done it on Monday is instantly comprehensible but is actually shorter than the Esperanto Li farintos ĝin je lundo. The compact forms always felt more natural to me, even when I was a beginner. I think people just aren't getting enough practice.

The style of expression in Esperanto tends to be simpler than that of English, even if complex tenses are possible in theory. "He'll have it done by Monday" might be put Li finos la taskon antaŭ lundo.

I agree.

Above all Esperanto - as a medium for communication among many different types of people - should aim for as much clarity as possible, which doesn't necessarily mean complexity. It seems even since Zamenhof there has been a desire to 'prove' Esperanto can be as complex as the national languages, so as to show that it is real rather than a toy.

Additionally, since Esperanto attracts a lot of language enthusiasts there is a tendency to wallow in technicalities and grammar in the absence of other outlets due to Esperanto's lack of wide usage.

How helpful is this really? Obviously, just like any other language, there are levels of complexity depending on the difficulty of what is being communicated, and to avoid misunderstanding in written texts especially, but this is always a smaller percentage than everyday use for the sake of communication.

Simple is usually better for most purposes because the ability to elaborate upon things is always possible. There's no need to try and produce the perfectly accurate sentence for every utterance. It makes for dull conversation anyway.

noelekim:These super-compressed forms also have their place. Here is the last sentence of H.G. Wells' 'War of the Worlds':

And strangest of all is it to hold my wife's hand again, and to think that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead.

This is how I translated it:

Kaj plej stranga estas tio, ke mi tenas denove la manon de mia edzino kaj pensas, ke mi kredis ke ŝi, kaj ŝi kredis ke mi, mortintas.

Twelve years' later I still think that "mortintas" has far more impact that "estas mortinta".

The sentence with "mortintas" is incomprehensible to me. I wouldn't have known what the sentence was trying to get at without reading the English (I know this because I read the Esperanto version before reading the English above).

I'd give the sentence as "Kaj plej strange estas tio, ke mi tenas denove la manon de mia edzino, pensante ke mi supozis sxin, kaj sxi supozis min, esti inter la mortintoj"

"mortintas" - this word gives the wrong meaning to me in this context, it implies that she is currently holding my hand and thinking that I am already dead.

Good Esperanto style strongly favors only minimal use of these participle-based verb forms. In many if not most cases you can be clearest about the meaning by adding a temporal modifier or two, and using a simple verb tense. Esperanto isn't French or English and you don't need to memorize when to use each complex verb form, and that's a good thing. It is amazing how simple grammar can put into your mind the exact tenses of complex verb forms, without actually using those tenses! And if you take a well-written Esperanto text that uses only simple tenses (not for learners but actual literature), and translate it back into something like French or English, you will find that you are using all of these complex tenses, without them ever having appeared in the Esperanto version. The story "La cxokolada biskvito" is a good example that I've used more than once to demonstrate this concept - I challenge them to read the text and translate part of it back into their native language using their language's normal grammar (not word for word translation), and see what tenses they come up with.

Yes, simplicity is preferable, rephrasing is often possible, and a bit of jam goes a long way, but there is nothing conceptually difficult about compound forms, and they are really handy—please get some use out of them!

Li finos antaŭ lundo is not quite the same as Li finintos je lundo as it implies that you know that the task is still undone.

Ŝi kredis ke mi mortintas is indeed a correct translation of She believed I had died. Note: -is ke ... -as, which is also present in the simpler but less effective kredis ke mi jam mortas.

To return to the original question: the formal translation of "He had said" is Li estis dirinta or Li dirintis (you should understand both forms straight away, if you don't then you need more practice—sorry folks, but you do); however in many contexts Li jam diris is the way to go.

opalo:Li finos antaŭ lundo is not quite the same as Li finintos je lundo as it implies that you know that the task is still undone.

You're right. They are not quite the same. The second sentence hardly exists outside your theorizing imagination. Could you please explain what a finintonto ( = homo kiu finintos) is or will be doing?

This is getting weird with more and more outlandish verb forms. The simple original question (How does one say, "He had said . . ." in Esperanto? Can you only say "Li diris . . ." to express this?) has been answered several times, and the answer is: "Yes you can. In some rare cases you might want to add jam or pli frue or say estis dirinta."

Ondo:

opalo:Li finos antaŭ lundo is not quite the same as Li finintos je lundo as it implies that you know that the task is still undone.

You're right. They are not quite the same. The second sentence hardly exists outside your theorizing imagination. Could you please explain what a finintonto ( = homo kiu finintos) is or will be doing?

This finintonto of yours—in the rare event that you'd need the word—is obviously a "guy who'll be done". Esperanto: four syllables. English: four syllables.

Are you seriously going to pretend that mal-proksim-ig-ant-a-j-n is easy to decode at sight and far-int-os is hard?

opalo:Are you seriously going to pretend that mal-proksim-ig-ant-a-j-n is easy to decode at sight and far-int-os is hard?

This isn't directed at me, but - yes.

My brain instantly parses the first. "Malproksimigi/igxi" is a pretty common construction, so common that you don't really have to think about the components parts to parse it. If you add "antajn" that's not too much more to handle. I would need to think a second for anything but an "-intus" or "antas" form, on the complex verbs. Once you start mixing tenses (-antis, -intos, -ontis), you need to think through the tenses and figure out what the word is trying to say, it doesn't come naturally. Not to me anyway.

Ondo:

Luib:Instead of "Li estis dirinta" you can also say "Li dirintis" whith the same meaning. But it seems to be rare (although I personnally use it as much as possible):

Yes, you can say "Li dirintis" if you don't care whether speakers of normal Esperanto will readily understand you or not. Or maybe you just want to show off with your excellent command of the hidden corners of grammar, because you "personnally use it as much as possible".

I didn't want to show off really. Actually I had been thinking the -intis forms to be more simple... And seemingly I'm not the only one to feel this way (at least Opalo does too)!
And this despite the fact that I'm not used to such compounds from other languages I'm more or less familiar with (except Latin and old Greek if I can call them "familiar"): German "Er hatte gesagt", French "Il avait dit", English "He had said", Italian "(Lui) aveva detto" (but let's be honest: Latin "(is/ille) dixerat" and old Greek... well, "lelogein" if I'm not mistaken, and I had to look up the endings in a grammar...)

If you want a full chain of thoughts: it is easier to say "... belas" than "... estas bela/e", because you then don't have to think about using an -a or an -e ending; and by the way it makes the language less eurocentric (in any European language I speak you'd use the equivalent of "estas", but not in Chinese as far as I know). So (to me) it just seems logical to do the same everytime when possible.

Anyway that's my thoughts and I'm not criticising anyone for not doing it the same way. I can perfectly well understand the many people who don't like the compound forms as much as I do...

But I would like to know how they would say it in Chinese (with a grammatical explanation if possible: I have virtually no idea of Chinese!)