beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4620 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian
| Message 1 of 4 17 January 2013 at 12:01am | IP Logged |
If you go to the bank in Germany and it is closed, you could say "die Bank war geschlossen" when you come
home.
Could you use gewesen instead of war and say die Bank ist geschlossen gewesen? I don't think I have ever
heard this construction in real life, but could it be used?
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Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4842 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian
| Message 2 of 4 17 January 2013 at 12:08am | IP Logged |
Yes, it's absolutely possible to say this. It's just another tense (present perfect instead of imperfect).
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Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6701 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map
| Message 3 of 4 17 January 2013 at 10:44am | IP Logged |
Yes, a different tense, and therefore also a different meaning. "Die Bank war geschlossen" refers directly to your experience when you stood in front of the bank and saw a handwritten notice on the door. Its current state is not relevant. "Die Bank ist geschlossen gewesen" gives an information in retrospect: the bank was closed for some hours, but now it is presumably open again.
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beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4620 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian
| Message 4 of 4 17 January 2013 at 4:54pm | IP Logged |
Thanks for that guys. The ge-ge combination jarred with me but like you say, no reason why this sentence wouldn't work.
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