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** Tag cleanup III **
There are a couple of translations in this next batch so I'd like you to have a quick look at these. Again, all original titles are kept for later.
See:
http://martin.swift.is/tatoeba/...l_renames.html
Most of these are just for standardising the capitalisation of tags, but there are some renames and translations towards the end of the file. Some are simple "Ad" -> "advertisement" but another renames "family" as "relatives" as the topic of the sentences isn't family, but the relatives.
My search gave me the term "preterite" as the translation for the Italian "passato remoto" but please correct me if I'm wrong.
These and other rename proposals are marked with little arrows on
http://martin.swift.is/tatoeba/tags.html
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/passato_remoto
Oh eventually I can quote Wiktionary. I feel free.
That page defines “passato remoto” as “past historic tense”. The latter term's page[1] links to the Wikipedia page for the term which redirects to the article on “preterite”[2], the discussion page of which claims that the terms are identical in at least one language.[3]
Just to be sure, is it better to use “past historic tense” than “preterite”?
[1] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/past_historic_tense
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_historical
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta...erger_proposal
Well, I didn't quoted it to contradict you ^^
Anyway, I don't really agree with this translation. I would never call a "passé simple" (French) with the term "passato remoto", even if they are perfectly identical (for my Northern usage).
The difference between English/Italian increases a lot in usage, therefore an English preterite could be translated in two different ways in Italian, and always one of them isn't a preterite. The same thing happens for Spanish/Italian pairs. I don't really know how to resolve this :/
As I said; just to be sure. I wasn't sure since there were conflicting information and you didn't appear to have written the Wiktionary page. I'll change the term to “past historic tense”. Thanks for clearing this up.
Oh, by the way, does anyone have any input on what the “passé simple” should be called? “Passé simple”, “simple past”, “preterite”, “passé défini”, definite past or something else entirely?
Imperfect tense?
No, I believe that the imperfect tense is something else entirely.
No, in French there are the "passé composé" (il a marché), the imperfect (l'imparfait, il marchait) and the "passé simple" (il marcha). And as fas as I know, preterite means that something happened in the past, so it doesn't work either because it can refer to any of them... In this case I'd choose to keep the French term, "passé simple" to avoid misunderstandings.
Preterite is a verb form found in some languages. The "passé simple" translates to "simple past" so that's what I would use.
But I think that would lead to misunderstandings because the people learning French maybe would think that this is the equivalent to the English "simple past", and this is not true.
Technically there is no "simple past" in English. Beginners to learning a foreign language or people who don't know much about English might have trouble with it, but simple past =/= preterite.
Wow... I had always been taught that the English past tense (e.g. he broke, she looked...) was the "simple past" [1]...
Then what's the name of the English past tense? preterite?
[1] http://www2.gsu.edu/~wwwesl/egw/verbs.htm
http://www.usingenglish.com/ref...regular-verbs/
Yeah, I've always heard it called "simple past" or just "past". (Of course, this is high school English in America. They don't wan't to scare people with big scary linguistic terms like "preterite". :P)
I've never heard anyone use the word "preterite" not in reference to tenses in foreign languages.
Here is a list of what I would call all the English tenses:
He will walk -> future
He will be walking -> future progressive
He will have walked -> future perfect
He walks -> present
He is walking -> present progressive
He has walked -> present perfect
He walked -> (simple) past
He was walking -> past progressive
He had walked -> past perfect (pluperfect)
Technically, there are only two tenses in English: present and past
simple, progressive, and perfect are aspects
I was talking about the French simple past doesn't equal what in English is known as the "simple past". They were afraid of people confusing the French simple past and the English "simple past" when they're not the same thing. The actual term for it in English is the preterite.
I would say preterite. At least that's what the corresponding Spanish tense (el pretérito) is usually called in English.
The corresponding English tense (e.g. "he walked") is usually just called "past", since there are no imperfect or other past tenses.
Well "he walked" is the preterite in English technically. German has the imperfect which equates to the English preterite. But I just found out there's a difference between imperfect and the simple past in French.
I would go with simple past or keep the French phrase, because it's kind of specific to French unless it applies to another language.
I believe the French "passé simple" exists in many Romance languages (and probably other Indo-European languages as well). I know it exists in Spanish.
The only difference is that it is rarely used in French, while it is very common in Spanish.
I'm pretty sure that the English past tense (e.g. "he walked") is from the same origin as the Spanish preterite and French passé simple. English has no real imperfect tense. Obviously, the perfect tenses in all three languages are related. (e.g. "He has walked" vs. "Él ha caminado")
Two comments: first, in Spanish we don't have any tense called "past simple", we have "indefinite praeteritum" & "imperfect praeteritum", and they do NOT match with the use of the French passé simple. In Italian I guess the pasato remoto is used more or less in the same situations as the passé simple, but that's it.
And taking your own example, if you say in French "il a marché", you can translate it to English as "he has walked" and "he walked"; and to Spanish as "él ha caminado" and "él caminó". There's no true equivalent in Spanish to the passé simple. French people use the passé simple (as far as I know) only in formal contexts, and mainly in literature and newspapers, that's why I'd rather have it clearly tagged so that learners (like me) can actually see that this is not the usual tense and not simply think that this is the equivalent of Spanish "pretérito indefinido" or English "simple past". Maybe they all came from the same thing, but they are no longer used in the same contexts or situations.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. I was referring to the linguistic origins of the tenses, not their usage (which is obviously very different in all three languages).
Also, in English, I've always heard the Spanish tenses referred to like this:
caminó -> preterite
caminaba -> imperfect
ha caminado -> (present) perfect
Maybe it's just some oddity of my school's Spanish curriculum, but I've never heard "preterite" refer to any of the tenses except for the first one above.
I agree that it's probably best to use a special tag for the French tense since it's so rare and doesn't correspond well in usage to any tense in any other language.
Just a little annotation (not directly for you, Zifre ;) )
Standard Italian usage is exactly the same as French.
In (Deep) Southern Italy you can easily listen to old people using the "passato remoto" exactly as the Spanish "preterite"/caminó, but it's not correct or standardised at all for what I know.
Moreover, sentences here in Tatoeba are mainly written by me and Guybrush88: as we are both from the same region in the Centre-North, we can be quite sure that we still haven't any Italian sentence using the "passato remoto" like in Spanish.
All this because! I would like a special tag for Italian too :P
Yes, the simple past forms (passé simple in French, pretérito indefinido in Spanish, pretérito perfeito in Portuguese) have the same origin, i.e., the Latin perfect form. As you might know, the original Latin did not have composed forms, only simple forms. Later, composed forms (j'ai fait, yo he hecho, eu tem feito) became common, but it took some time for them to "travel" from Rome, where new fashions where created, to the periphery. Therefore, in French, the passé simple is not use any more in spoken language. In Spanish, the simple and composed forms are used in parallel, but for expressing different situation (although in South American Spanish, the simple form is also used for cases where in Spain the composed form is used). In Portuguese (I do only know well the Portuguese of Brasil) the simple form is the most common, whereas you do not really have to use the composed form (interesting also that Portuguese uses "ter" = Latin "tenere" instead of "haver" = Latin "habere" to form the composed forms, as the other Romanic languages do: French "avoir", Spanish "haber"). Also, Portuguese is the only Romanic language that has preserved a simple form for the past perfect ("fizera", also "tinha feito"). This has been replaced by the composed forms in the other Romanic languages ("avais fait", "había hecho"). I don't know enough Italian to say, but following the theory of fashions originating from Rome, I suppose that the simple form might have even less importance than in French or might have disappeared at all.
The expressions "perfect" and "imperfect" refer, as far as I know, to the usage of the corresponding past tenses (praeteritum = passed by (= German vorübergegangen)) in Latin: "perfect" means "terminated", i.e., the praeteritum perfectum was used for actions that started and ended in the past, whereas the praeteritum imperfectum ("not terminated") for actions that started in the past and persisted till the present.
That means, there exist different denominations for the tenses, some originating from its grammatical structure (passé simple), some from its usage ("perfect", "imperfect"). As the usage of the tenses differes considerably between the languages, it is very difficult to find good translations, or even impossible. I would stick to the original expressions of the individual language.
Due to the different usage of the tenses in the different languages, it is very difficult to translate the tenses in sentences correctly, as a single sentence rarely deliveres the context...
>in French, the passé simple is not use any more in spoken language.
I beg to differ. The french passé simple is a narrative tense, along with the passé antérieur and they are used to tell stories, irrelevant of whether they're written OR SPOKEN.
As such, passé simple has ALWAYS been used to tell stories, no less now than before.
It is true that passé composé tends to replace passé simple and plus-que-parfait the passé antérieur, in the spoken narrative of uneducated people, but not everybody is uneducated or speaks a broken French. I use passé simple to tell stories, and I love it because it is so much more beautiful.
Actually, passé simple is familiar to people whose parents read or told them stories as they were children. Hence the charm that is ascribed to it, which is also the reason why it sounds unfamiliar to uneducated or poorly educated people, or people who never read stories.
As people who don't read - or are not being read to - greatly outnumber those who do, especially in the younger generation, the perception that passé simple "is disappearing" or "is outdated" is dominant, although it is plain wrong, as any educated story-teller will prove.
"Il se marièrent et eurent beaucoup d'enfants...analphabètes." Voilà !
Just to avoid a misunderstanding (not the least on my side), this isn't a question of finding corresponding sentences, but the term which would be used for the original sentence.
So, if there was a sentence in French that was in what the French would call the passé simple, the tag shouldn't say which tense the English sentence would be in, but rather which tense English linguists would use to describe the French sentence. While some translations would all use the same tag (e.g. topical tags), grammatical tags would differ with translations of each other.
Once we get the translation feature, that sentence would then say “passé simple” in the French interface. The question is what the English interface should say.
I guess the English interface should say 'French "passé simple"'. If it is impossible or misleading to translate, don't translate.
I agree ^^
I will ask my English (well she's Italian) teacher about it tomorrow. I perfectly see your point, but I imagine we need a linguist or something more expert. Ohoh, maybe my teacher is. (>Pharamp doubts it<)
Reading foreigners talking about the classification of french tenses with english tags could be hilarious. It is just sad, alas...
This is the very reason I stopped contributing to Tatoeba: Anglophone kids deciding, in English, what French is. Already with English, they have enough problems...
Have fun!