Al la enhavo

missing tenses?

de Alex Stephen, 2007-januaro-20

Mesaĝoj: 14

Lingvo: English

pastorant (Montri la profilon) 2007-februaro-05 23:53:12

Very true. Thanks for clarifying that.

Dankon por la klarigo de tiu misinformo ridulo.gifsenkulpa.gif

EL_NEBULOSO (Montri la profilon) 2007-februaro-08 10:28:50

Hi,

my mother tongue is German and, as pointed out by erinja, it has, like English, tenses that are not "available" in Esperanto or, are rarely used.

Anyway, the German dialect that I also speak (I am Austrian), only uses a present, a future, and a perfect tense and we never have a problem to express anything as clearly as in "Hochdeutsch".

So in everyday life three tenses are obviously enough, more tenses are rather for "language experts/scientists"...

Gerald

Electric Prophet (Montri la profilon) 2007-februaro-10 19:22:23

erinja:it's important for beginners to understand that just because Esperanto has these capabilities, doesn't mean we always use them.

So even though it is possible in Esperanto to distinguish between "I run" and "I am running", in practice, we don't distinguish unless we're trying to add strong emphasis.

So in most cases, in Esperanto we use a simple past, present, or future, even if in English we would not. In most cases, "mi kuris" would be used to mean not only "I ran", but also "I was running" and "I had run".
I made this observation because I'm doing Bildoj kaj demandoj.

So to add emphasis to something, you use the verb tenses religiously? It's a curious device of rhetoric, but I'm enticed to try it, or am I confused?

erinja (Montri la profilon) 2007-februaro-10 23:09:20

Electric Prophet:
I made this observation because I'm doing Bildoj kaj demandoj.

So to add emphasis to something, you use the verb tenses religiously? It's a curious device of rhetoric, but I'm enticed to try it, or am I confused?
That's an interesting way of putting it, but I guess it makes some kind of sense.

The way I normally think of it, in most cases, it doesn't really matter that much whether you say "I ran" or "I was running" or "I had run". But occasionally, it really matters. And on these occasions, you are more specific with your speech. So it's not quite the same thing as "using it only to add emphasis", even though that's pretty much it; it's being very specific about tense when (in your opinion) it's very important to be specific. I don't personally view it so much as a rhetorical device; I see it as only using the various tenses when it really, truly matters. In itself, that can be some form of a rhetorical device; when does it truly matter? but it isn't exactly a rhetorical device, by definition.

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