>goes under the same logic as Perfekt. Okay, even more so for
>the Berliner - they tend to use Plusquamperfekt instead of
>Perfekt. Bad for them.
If you refer to this (non-existing) "tense": "ich habe gesagt
gehabt, ich habe gegessen gehabt" etc., that is the "Perfekt"
tense + the additional participle of the verb haben ("to have"),
then this is not only typical of Berlin, it is typical of entire,
reunified, Germany (plus Austria): it is wrong - a bad
habit - it is an... epidemia. :)) [the real PlusQuamPerfekt is
"ich hatte gesagt (I had said); ich hatte gegessen" (I had
eaten) | "ich hatte gehabt" = "I had had".]
This along with the... verbal tics, such as "denke ich mal; ich
denke" (virtually no one says today "ich meine, ich glaube," in
the sense of "I mean/I guess/I think", as if the English
"I think" were translated into German :-), "sage ich mal" and
the unnerving "so zu sagen" (approx. "so to speak"); "so, also,
na ja."
"Ich denke, ich habe ihr so zu sagen gesagt gehabt. Sie hat
schon die Information bekommen gehabt, sag' ich mal." :))
>in German there is
>strict differentiation between a scientific and non-scientific
>context.
It isn't that strict either (die kochen auch nur mit Wasser ;-).
e.g. any German will use the word "Dialekt" whenever referring
to regional language aspects. Only higher educated and
professionals will use the German word for that, "Mundart".
Or: officially still in use "Fernsprecher, Fernsprechanlage" and
the like. But vox populi still sticks to... Telephon (which is
allowed nowadays to be spelled like this: Telefon, as Graphik
is allowed to be printed as Grafik :-).
> So if you are a foreigner who is not acquainted with a
>corresponding expression in German (which probably exists for
>what I wanted to say, but not to my knowledge) and if you are
>forced to think of a translation, you have to avoid foreign words.
>My English does help me enormously in reading scientific texts
>in German, just as it helps me enormously in Latin.
Well, one has to learn those Greek-Latin words that are used by
Germans, and be careful with their counterparts used in English
(where those words anyway have a more comprising range of
semantics; and where many so-called "false friends" are lurking,
such as "actual, eventual, to apply" etc. The Germanic "false friends"
are a bit more transparent; an extreme pair would be "Gift" vs
"gift", "Knabe" vs "knave".)
>You hardly ever hear "Ich habe es nicht machen können."
Perhaps in North Germany a bit less frequently than in the
South (in Bavarian [i hobs net mOxn kena]), where "ich konnte
es nicht machen" sounds a bit too... "preissisch." :-)
>If you do hear Päteritum of other verbs in spoken
>German, it would be to express an action in process,
>similar to the English continuous tenses.
Hardly comparable. The use of Präteritum will rather be a
sign of some social status (higher education) and... region.
Northerners will more frequently use it in speech than
Southerners. But, at the same time, the Perfekt tense is quite
frequent everywhere. NB: Germans (& al., Romanians
included :) have their problems with the English Present
Perfect tense (not quite realising that in English it is a...
present tense).
>Eva
George