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These auxiliary verbs shall, will, may and can; also must, have to and should are the most difficult part of English grammar to me

From what I've seen of Dutch grammar, you've got some complicated verbal paradigms, too. For example, the modal particles dan, eens, even, maar, misschien, nou, ook, soms, and toch. Ga maar zitten is polite, but can you say ga zitten for a stronger, ruder sense?


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Originally Posted By: twosleepy
There's probably enough 2 centses in here already, but I throw in 2 more: in Spanish, the idea of "used to" is expressed in the imperfect tense, a past tense form. I'd be interested to know why it's called "imperfect".


Not sure about the Spanish usage but the imperfect generally does not imply a completion to the action.

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tsuwm Offline OP
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>>options 2, 3 and 4 change the voice, I think.

>No, the voice remains passive, but the mood changes.

thanks for that; I can't seem to keep the two straight.

tsuwm #189941 03/14/10 11:07 PM
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I originally posted here thinking there must be a simple answer to the question, "what is this voice/mood called," so that I could reprimand the cited blogger. you know, "you shouldn't use the farshimalt mood in this situation because it is likely to ramfeezle your readers." alas and feh.

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For example, the modal particles dan, eens, even, maar, misschien, nou, ook, soms, and toch. Ga maar zitten is polite, but can you say ga zitten for a stronger, ruder sense?

Yes, ga zitten can be polite (invitation) or rude (command) only depending on the tone/voice/. The maar is of no consequence for either meaning. You can say : "ga dan nou toch maar eens even zitten" ( invitiation/ familiar ) and the nou dan dan maar eens even, those you call modal particles, mean in fact nothing. But even with the whole range of modal particles it can be said in a commanding threatening way.

When I considered English to be the easiest of the three neighbouring languages to learn it was because English does not have like French ( Italian and Spanish too) these two past tenses: the imparfait and the passé défini. Nor the conjunctif or conditionel. And German has those horrible Fälle and Kasus-Fallendungen. ( but now I saw those tenses wriggle up some difficulties in English too in their own way).

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I'd be interested to know why it's called "imperfect".

Short answer is that the Roman grammarians called it that: imperfectus as opposed to the other past tense the perfectus. And, Faldo is right. The ancient grammarians did not have a grammatical category called aspect (German Aktionsart, Russian вид vid) which "defines the temporal flow (or lack thereof) in the described event or state. In English, for example, the present tense sentences "I swim" and "I am swimming" differ in aspect (the first sentence is in what is called the habitual aspect, and the second is in what is called the progressive, or continuous, aspect). The related concept of tense or the temporal situation indicated by an utterance, is typically distinguished from aspect." (link)


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German has those horrible Fälle and Kasus-Fallendungen

It's interesting how the older German grammatical traditon translated these Graeco-Latin grammatical terms into German. Greek πτωσις (ptōsis) meant literally 'falling, fall'. The romans translated this as casus (< cadō 'to fall'), and the Germans carried on the tradition with Fall. The idea was that the nominative case was normal and the oblique cases fell away from that. In older grammars, this is called accidence. English got rid of its cases and so did all the Romance languages, but the Slavic languages held on tight to theirs. It's not really a question of simplifying the language but making it complicated in different ways. wink


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tsuwm #189945 03/14/10 11:59 PM
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there must be a simple answer to the question

Languages are much more complicated things than Lynne Truss and other grammaticohooligans would have you think.


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tsuwm #189946 03/15/10 01:05 AM
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Originally Posted By: tsuwm
"you shouldn't use the farshimalt mood in this situation because it is likely to ramfeezle your readers." alas and feh.


works for me.


btw, ramfeezle got picked up by my spellcheck, but not farshimalt.


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tsuwm Offline OP
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>ramfeezle got picked up by my spellcheck, but not farshimalt.

my spellcheck (and that used here at AWAD) chokes on 'spellcheck'.

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