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From: Peter T. Breuer on 17 Dec 2005 13:53 In comp.os.linux.misc blmblm(a)myrealbox.com wrote: > In article <3skd73-t1h.ln1(a)news.it.uc3m.es>, > Peter T. Breuer <ptb(a)oboe.it.uc3m.es> wrote: >>In comp.os.linux.misc blmblm(a)myrealbox.com wrote: >>> I frequently hear foreign speakers say "I have a doubt about >>> [ whatever ]," where a native speaker would say "I have a question." >> >>That's spanish. Spanish only, as far as I know. It seems to be a polite >>circumlocution, inviting the responder to sooth away the doubt (I am >>tempted to answer "well, see a spirtual advisor"). > Hm .... I might not have explained that one well. This happens in You state it fine - you don't seem to understand my explanation, however (which puzzles me). > "I have a doubt about Fortran. Does it always pass parameters > by reference?" Or "I have a doubt about bash. How do I search > for something in the command history?" I'm making these up rather > than attempting to remember and quote, but I'm pretty sure they're > representative. So what is your question? You stated that before, and I explained! > As for Spanish only -- I asked this question in alt.usage.english > a while back and was told that people whose first language is Italian > also seem to employ this usage. Could be, no? It could be - I don't know if italians use that circumlocution or not. > I think maybe what I'm remembering is something like when to say > "I go" and when to say "I am going." It's always the first - the gerund is hardly used in spanish, and I'm not sure if it has more or less immediacy (in english it expresses something you are in the middle of doing, while I _think_ that in spanish it has more the sense of extended duration around the referenced point in time). > My recollection is that Spanish > draws the lines between these two in different places from English. Could be. There are worse problems - spanish mix up "the" and "a" horribly. I suspect "the" is used to indicate an inderminate instance in spanish, which is what "a" would be used for in ingulish. And I have no idea which of the two near-past tenses I should be using when. Lo hizo? Lo hacia? Lo estaba haciendo? Why? Peter
From: JosephKK on 17 Dec 2005 15:58 Peter T. Breuer wrote: ><snip> > Peter Actually English is one of the most difficult languages to learn either a first language or a second language. Mandarin and Russian are also difficult. Spanish and Greek are both much easier. I wish i knew enough to address pre-columbian languages, african langauges or bharati languages as well. -- JosephKK
From: Peter T. Breuer on 17 Dec 2005 16:22 In comp.os.linux.misc JosephKK <joseph2k(a)lanset.com> wrote: > Peter T. Breuer wrote: > Actually English is one of the most difficult languages to learn either a > first language or a second language. From all he evidence I can accumulate, it is one of the easiest. > Mandarin and Russian are also > difficult. And I would also say that mandarin and russian are easy (russian is complicated by some excess cases, however, but nevertheless shows signs of being a devolved language like english, with many simplifications indicative of much mixing and pidgin-ization). > Spanish and Greek are both much easier. Spanish is slightly harder than english (merely having having genedered nouns renders it more complicated; russian has them too, but at least spanish does not decline them by case). Greek is of course a relatively hard language. > I wish i knew enough > to address pre-columbian languages, african langauges or bharati languages > as well. What on earth did your "actually" mean, actually! Peter
From: Enrique Perez-Terron on 17 Dec 2005 16:40 On Sat, 17 Dec 2005 19:53:16 +0100, Peter T. Breuer <ptb(a)oboe.it.uc3m.es> wrote: > duda I can confirm that I see this quite often on the spanish newsgroups. I can't remember I would express myself that way as a child, so I too wonder what is the pragmatics of this expression. Actually, all the mechanisms that make people express themselves differently in different situations, and also how certain ways are picked up and become modern, then mainstream, finally old-fashioned... That is a world in itself. Inviting to sooth the doubt... Yes, quite possible. It is certainly a circumlocution. It is a bit less demanding, less direct. But at a point, when sufficiently many people say it in sufficiently many situations, it gets difficult not to say it, when you notice that reverting to the old "tengo una pregunta" has somehow become unusual and remarkable, then it looses its built-in intention. > Could be. There are worse problems - spanish mix up "the" and "a" > horribly. I suspect "the" is used to indicate an inderminate instance > in spanish, which is what "a" would be used for in English. This one I too find hard. It's like the speaker pretends the thing in question is well known, or perhaps that there is only one of it, and therefore it should be well know, or.. I guess one has to look at the emotional content of it, turning the thing into something "known" and "familiar" evokes the idea of something more cozy... Perhaps it is a bit as if you say "the man reached out his/the left hand", while you could also have said "he reached out a hand". Definite article in the first case, indefinite in the second. French too uses articles differently, and often more like Spanish. > And I have > no idea which of the two near-past tenses I should be using when. Lo > hizo? Lo hacia? Lo estaba haciendo? Why? That is easier. Imagine you stand at a bus-stop waiting, and the rain is pooring down. Suddenly there is a sharp click just behind you. I describe the standing, the waiting and the pouring, to describe a situation. By now it has all ended, but I am immersing you in a world, in a situation, where the click happened. So even the bus has been there and picked you up long time ago now, back then, these things had not ended. That is when you use "imperfecto". Just listen to this latinism, fecto, faquere, to do. Perfecto: done, finished. Imperfecto: not finished. (Side note: It has never been written faquere, but facere, but the pronunciation was originally with hard 'k'; the softening came toward the end of the Roman empire, I believe.) One variation: a repeated action, something you used to do, is also expressed in imperfectum. It is imperfect, because you used to do it during some period, and you are immersing the listener in that period: "I went to work every morning at eight o'clock. One day the bus did not show up..." In contrast, the tense "indefinido" (a perfect misnomer), denotes a tense where you do not let your imagination remain in the action, rather you sort of wrap the action up like in a packet, and go on to the next thing. Lo hizo y volvió. Lo estaba haciendo is of course just as imperfect as lo hacía, just more so, and it excludes the repeated, habitual aspect. But what about this? I sat in a bus when the smell of a fart was noticed, and an elder man looked at a young boy. It took a few seconds before the boy realized the accusation. He protested: ¡Yo no he sido! -Enrique
From: Peter T. Breuer on 17 Dec 2005 17:31
In comp.os.linux.misc Enrique Perez-Terron <enrio(a)online.no> wrote: > In contrast, the tense "indefinido" (a perfect misnomer), denotes a tense > where you do not let your imagination remain in the action, rather you sort > of wrap the action up like in a packet, and go on to the next thing. Lo hizo > y volvia. OK - that helps. One is for a recently finished action that the story continues to use as an fix for the timepoint, and the other is for a recently finished action that the story moves on from and does not stay in. The latter is effectively a double-imperfect - we form a modality by wrapping a phrase in a grammatical structure, and here the modal operator is what moves a sentence into the past. The question is how to do that on a sentence that already contains such an operator. Eg. The bus is coming [](The bus is coming) = The bus came [](the bus is coming) THEN (the rain starts) = The rain started when the bus came In english, putting this whole thing further into the past gives you [](he tells me that ([](the bus is coming) THEN (the rain starts))) = He told me that []([](the bus is coming) THEN (the rain starts))) He told me the [](the rain started when the bus came) = He told me the the rain started when the bus came which shows one that the second application of [] inside the clause makes no difference in english. Presumably it does make a slight difference in spanish. > Lo estaba haciendo is of course just as imperfect as lo haca, just > more so, and it excludes the repeated, habitual aspect. > But what about this? I sat in a bus when the smell of a fart was noticed, > and an elder man looked at a young boy. It took a few seconds before the > boy realized the accusation. He protested: Yo no he sido! "It was not me" in english. That's different for a start because we use "it", where spanish uses "me". I think the old american slang "hain't me" is most nearly equal. But yes, the spanish definitely is using perfect. Peter |