Franconian Beer Message Board
Evolution of English and German |
| Posted by Nick B. on 2013-10-31 06:04:43 |
| Continuous tenses also supposedly exist in romantic languages like Spanish, at least as I've been told. I'd have thought that's how they'd found their way into English. And this brings to mind, a couple of students have told me that a sort of non-standard present "continuous" form is also here and there to be heard. Like, "I'm drinking a beer." Proper German is "I drink a beer / Ich trinke ein Bier", without a continuous form with helper verb "to be". But people supposedly often say (I've never noticed it), "Ich bin ein Bier trinken." Perhaps it's more common without a noun like "ein Bier" though, more like "Ich bin essen" or "Ich bin arbeiten". There is another formal German form that approximates the use of the present continuous in English, "Ich bin beim Biertrinken", with a noun form of the verb together with preposition "bei" and the definite article "das", which then is transformed to "dem" courtesy of the dative nature of "bei", and also contracted. But that's different. An English equivalent might be "I'm at beer-drinking at the moment", I suppose. What I learned to call the Gerundivum in German is an adverbial form of the present continuous. "The good-tasting beer / Das gut schmeckende Bier". Here it's an active verb, where the noun "beer" actively has the property of "good-tasting". The German verb is in the infinitive but with a "d" added and properly declinated according to case and gender of the noung. (A passive form of this "the well-made beer" sees the past tense form used in English as well as German, but then of course declinated in the latter, "das gut gemachte Bier".) |
| Followups: |
 Evolution of English and German by TreinJan on 2013-10-31 09:07:35 |
| Evolution of English and German by Nick B. on 2013-10-31 12:48:41 |
| Evolution of English and German by Uncle Jimbo on 2013-10-31 16:40:03 |