Sublevel 102 wrote:
WTF? Why Russians have only 3 grammar times, but others more than 12???
The vast majority of languages contains some sorts of past, present and future tenses. Many languages also have some means of differentiation between an action in progress (English continuous tenses) or an action that has been completed (English perfect tenses). Latin, Spanish and English (amongst multiple other languages) contain the plusquamperfect (past perfect in English) tense, used for specifying that a given action had been done before an another past action. That's the general idea for Indo-European languages, anyway. I think there are some native Southern American tribes whose languages don't contain the past tense, as well as some African languages that have specific tenses for something that happened yesterday or will happen tommorow. As well as numerous other I'm not all that familiar with.
..Hey, you asked for it.
TT: I guess one could use those words to describe it.
TT: If armed with a predilection for the inapt.
Oh, well, I didn't remember, sorry.
We said so many things in the old forum...
EDIT:
Vurn wrote:
Sublevel 102 wrote:
WTF? Why Russians have only 3 grammar times, but others more than 12???
The vast majority of languages contains some sorts of past, present and future tenses. Many languages also have some means of differentiation between an action in progress (English continuous tenses) or an action that has been completed (English perfect tenses). Latin, Spanish and English (amongst multiple other languages) contain the plusquamperfect (past perfect in English) tense, used for specifying that a given action had been done before an another past action. That's the general idea for Indo-European languages, anyway. I think there are some native Southern American tribes whose languages don't contain the past tense, as well as some African languages that have specific tenses for something that happened yesterday or will happen tommorow. As well as numerous other I'm not all that familiar with.
