Past Tenses in Western Europe

I was speaking to some friends once about I think the differences of various
registers of French, and I mentioned the loss of the preterite to the
perfect; a German friend asked what I meant, and when I explained, remarked
that the same was true of German. This completely flabbergasted me: my
German is limited to academic texts and the songs set by Mahler or Schubert,
and libretti of Wagner or Strauss, and from these I had the impression that
German had both a preterite and a perfect, like some varieties of English.
In discussion, I was told (there were three Germans around) that the
preterite sounded formal or archaic; one suggested at some point that it was
appropriate for backgrounding action that gets interrupted, which really
surprised me (this would be equivalent to the Romance imperfect).

Anyway, I know that some dialects of Italian have undergone the same process
as French in abandoning their preterite; I seem to remember that it was the
Northern ones. Is this, then, a Sprachbund phenomenon? How comparable is the
German development - I'd be grateful if somebody could summarise it for me -
to the Romance ones? What other languages does this extend to - is it in
Dutch? And then, are there any dates - particularly, is there any way to
link it to English, in which it is happening in American English, but not in
(standard) British English? If there is something to this, I'm envisioning
an England in which these sorts of phenomena are happening before / during
the major periods of colonisation; the results differ in the two countries.

I'm not entirely sure that I understand Sprachbund theory; I thought that it
generally involved high amounts of bi- or multi-lingualism. As such, I can
understand why this sort of thing might happen in some areas of mainland
Europe, but how would they be able to jump the Channel? I've also heard
(somewhere) that the Great Vowel Shift in English is part of a continental
phenomenon; is this true, or even possible? Or are we rather dealing with
independent, coincidentally similar sound changes?

Neeraj Mathur


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