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Using "would" to express past tense | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4843 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes  Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 9 of 18 15 October 2012 at 7:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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In the example sentences, 'would' is the past tense of 'will' in the meaning 'to want'. In these cases, "would" can be translated with "wollte".
"I told Jimmy to stop it, but he wouldn't." "Ich sagte Jimmy, er solle aufhören, aber er wollte nicht." More interesting are sentences in which 'would' denotes a habit. In those cases, "would" is intranslatable into German. An outdated way to express "would" here, would be "pflegte zu tun". "He would go to the bakery every morning and buy some bread." "Er ging jeden Morgen in die Bäckerei und kaufte Brot." or: "Er pflegte jeden Morgen in die Bäckerei zu gehen und Brot zu kaufen." About "if I were": Calling it an "irrealis" doesn't change the fact that it's a past subjunctive. Irrealis is only a function of the past subjunctive. You can see that in German which still has a productive past subjunctive that is used in the function of the irrealis: "Wenn ich du wäre, würde ich das nicht tun." "I wouldn't do that, if I were you." Because German still differentiates between past subjunctive "wäre" and indicative "war", you can see that English "were" in an if-clause is historically a past subjunctive. Swedish also has the somewhat outdated form "vore" which is a past subjunctive, and Icelandic has a very much alive subjunctive whose past form for "to be" is "væri". So, you can see that the Germanic languages all function in the same way here, but the comparison with Spanish is of course not wrong. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| michaelyus Diglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 4564 days ago 53 posts - 87 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: Italian, French, Cantonese, Korean, Catalan, Vietnamese, Lingala, Spanish Studies: Hokkien | Message 10 of 18 15 October 2012 at 7:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I also think the naming of the present and past (simple) subjunctive forms ("that I be" and "that I were" respectively) is historically and structurally motivated as opposed to functionally motivated. This tension in nomenclature exists in all inflectional paradigms really. German's "Konjunktiv I vs II" tries to eliminate any indication of structural differences, concentrating on the function as two different types of Konjunktiv. French's "imparfait du subjonctif" is structurally more related to the "passé simple / prétérit", although it functions as a literary equivalent to the "présent du subjonctif" under specific circumstances [a past tense in the main clause, usually]; however, using the "imparfait" label fills a neat hole in the "présent, parfait, ..., plus-que-parfait" schematic: verbal paradigm structural symmetry, if you will.
As for that example "He would not move, no matter how many times I asked", you have a complex sentence there. "No matter [how]" is the subordinate / dependent clause here, whereas "he would not move" is the main clause, which can stand alone. Whether it would be best analysed as the negated conditional of "to move", or as the past of "to will" + "move" as a bare infinitive; that's hard to say. I think it's quite well established that the conditional is derived from an infinitive plus a past tense of Classical Latin "habēre": French, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese (with its famous mesoclisis still intact in some European varieties), as well as Gallo-Italian and Venetian, use the Latin imperfect, whilst Italian ended up using the Latin perfect (although even in Dante's Florentine, the imperfect-based conditional is extant - e.g. Paradiso VII.18). Nice article on the English subjunctive here. Edited by michaelyus on 15 October 2012 at 7:25pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 11 of 18 15 October 2012 at 7:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Dutch doesn't really differentiate anymore but has the obsolete "ware". Using
subjunctives in Dutch (except in some set phrases) would elicit "are you from the Middle Ages" comments. But, originally, Dutch worked the same way. Edited by tarvos on 15 October 2012 at 7:22pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| unmaad Tetraglot Newbie India Joined 6175 days ago 38 posts - 52 votes Speaks: Bengali*, English, GermanC2, Hindi Studies: Japanese | Message 12 of 18 16 October 2012 at 11:50am | IP Logged | |||||
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What I find interesting here is what happens when I try to reverse-translate, i.e., translate the translated-into-German sentence back to English:
German: “Ich sagte Jimmy, er solle aufhören, aber er wollte nicht.” English: “I told Jimmy that he should stop, but he did not want to.“ Clearly, what we have here is different from the original in both structure and meaning. I agree with Josquin that ‘would/will’ here has the same contextual meaning as German ‘wollen’, and not ‘werden’. However, it is still not the same and it may not even be translatable to German, just like the usage of Konjunktiv I (solle) is to some extent untranslatable to English. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6581 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 13 of 18 16 October 2012 at 12:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
This I can kind of buy. "They're different but we call both of them "subjunctive" because of historical and structural reasons." I still think it's misleading to call it "past subjunctive" because it is simply not functionally a past subjunctive. It might have evolved out of it, but its function now has nothing to do with the past tense, as far as I can see. I'd be fine with calling it the "subjunctive II". 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4621 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 14 of 18 16 October 2012 at 3:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Very interesting replies. I'd never really thought about would and will being linked. As a native speaker of English and someone who hasn't studied languages at university, I just guide myself by what sounds right, I have never actually sat down and reduced English to its component parts, which many people do when learing it as a foreign language.
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| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 15 of 18 16 October 2012 at 4:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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| unmaad Tetraglot Newbie India Joined 6175 days ago 38 posts - 52 votes Speaks: Bengali*, English, GermanC2, Hindi Studies: Japanese | Message 16 of 18 16 October 2012 at 5:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
That is exactly what I was aiming at. The 'mundane' form of German still conveys the exact same meaning (I would rather use the word 'feel' here) as the 'weird' structure of English. Now the question is, while translating, do we need to take into account the English-specific structure and pertain to it in German or should we simply deduce the meaning and write it in German? In my opinion we should do the latter as that keeps the translated text more in line with the TL. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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