How many tenses in your language?

[Conchita]

[Jamie (K)]

[Jamie (K)]

[Jamie (K)]

I'm not positive how many tenses English has (I guess native speakers don't count them here), but I can tell you that African-American English Vernacular has more tenses than standard English. I am not joking; this is a documented fact.

How is this for a tense?

The police ask some kids, "Have you seen this man?" and the kids reply, "We been seen him!" In African-American dialect this means, "We saw him, but that was a very long time ago, and he is probably gone."

On TV I once saw two African-American women talking. One said, "I'm sorry. I should have told you." Her friend angrily answered, "You shoulda been told me!" That meant, "You should have told me a very long time ago, right at the beginning."

So they can say things with a verb tense that ordinary people speaking standard English need a whole phrase to say.

[spearhead]

I think white Americans create new tenses too. I have a tape recording of a business man by the name of Kevin Trudeau and he uses the phrase 'they still would have went' instead of 'they still would have gone.'

[Alan]

Hi,

This construction I would have went is very common in Scottish English.

Alan
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English as a Second Language
You can read my ESL story In short

[spearhead]

Hi Alan,

This is very interesting. Would you classify this construction as correct English? I mean after all it's a different kind of condictional from the standard version we are being taught by our English teachers?

[Alan]

Hi Spearhead,

That's a huge question asking me if I think it's correct English! All I can say is it's common in Scottish English in a slang way. I wouldn't use it and I wouldn't recommend it under the heading of standard English but then I think you have to allow that there are variations of English all over the world.

Alan
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English as a Foreign Language
You can read my EFL story Everything in the Garden is lovely

[Jamie (K)]

Many people in the US also say would have went, should have went, etc. There are very few features of American colloquial dialects that didn't originate in some British dialect or other, and all of these features are centuries old.

Like Alan, I also wouldn't consider it to be standard English, and in parts of America where it is used, teachers try to get children to stop using them.

The thing about the tenses in African American Vernacular English is that many of them don't have any equivalent in standard English and have to be translated with long phrases or sentences. While "would have went" can simply be converted to "would have gone", some of these AAVE tenses represent time concepts that don't exist at all in the standard English language. These African American tenses are also centuries old, by the way.

[Surelen]

Hi! I'm currently at Uni to become a Latin instructor, so I thought I would correct something I saw on the first page.

Latin only has six(6) tenses. Present, imperfect, future, perfect, pluperfect and future perfect. The tenses are grouped either in "continuous" (present system)or "completed" (perfect system) aspect. Present, imperfect and future tense verbs are all "continuous" because the actions they describe are in the process of happening. Perfect, pluperfect and future perfect verbs are "complete" because the action of the verb has been completed.

Each verb also has person, number, mood and voice. That may be where the confusion over the number of tenses came from.

Person is who is doing the speaking (I/we = 1st, you/you = 2nd, s/he/it/they = 3rd).

Number is whether the speaker is singular or plural.

Mood is how the speaker treats the action of the verb. There are three of them: indicative, imperative and subjunctive. Indicative treats the action as a fact, while imperative mood treats it as a command and subjunctive mood treats it as an idea or a wish. People screw up the subjunctive in English all the time, and I don't blame them. It isn't fun in either language!

Voice is what the relationship is between the subject of the clause and the verb. There are three, though honestly, I have only ever seen Middle voice twice in Latin. It's more common in ancient Greek. Active and Passive are the other two. Active voice is used when the subject performs the action (The boy flies the kite.), while Passive voice is used when the subject receives the action (The kite is flown by the boy.) Middle voice shows a subject performing an action to itself or for its own interest.

Latin is a very verb heavy language, so if anybody is thinking about learning it, be prepared to bury your nose in a book and memorize endless strings of information.

[Alan]

Hi Surelen,

You said:

[Torsten]