Re: Past Tenses in Western Europe


Neeraj Mathur wrote:
> 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?

The dying process pf preterite at least in spoken German is not
extended to all verbs equally. Some high frequency verbs like "gehen"
and "Sein" have not changed as for example in comparison with "Essen".
People rarely say: ich "aß" but very often "ich ging" or "ich war".

.

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