Re: Danish enigma

willemvermeer wrote:

> As for the first type of examples, Dutch sentences like "Ik heb twee
> jaar als leraar gewerkt" tend to imply that the speaker is no longer
> working as a teacher at the moment of speaking unless drastic
> measures are taken to avoid that implication. This is a recurrent
> source of misunderstandings and mistranslations. ("I definitely
> thought you'd said you had a different job now ...".) If you want to
> express the fact that you are still working, you have to use a
> present tense, preferably also adding some kind of temporal anchor,
> like "nu" 'now', e.g. "Ik werk hier [nu] twee jaar als leraar".

This aspect is valid in German too (quasi identical).

> As for the second type of examples, a perfect would be mandatory in
> Dutch as well (a simple preterite would be schizophrenic because it
> suggests you are telling a story at a moment when urgent action is
> called for).

In Romanian, the use of the preterit is limited only to... telling
stories.
(The neighboring Uralic idiom Hungarian doesn't need the diversification
praeterit, perf., past perf.)

> That's one of the several reasons why Germans
> often strike speakers of Dutch as drama queens: in German you can
> tell a story entirely in perfect tenses.

But N-Germans (unlike S-Germans) do make slight
differences between Prät. and Perf. Moreover: in high-
style Hochdeutsch this differentiation is a must. To most of today's
nat-speak "Diese Bescheinigung ist von XYZ zur Vorlage beim
Finanzamt ausgestellt worden." = "Diese Bescheinigung wurde von
XYZ... ausgestellt." However, the former is better, since it
conveys a secondary meaning: the paper is still valid *today*,
i.e., the receiver still can forward it to the Revenues Service,
whereas the latter sentence might also imply that it was issued
2000 or 200 years ago. Vice versa, "Diese Bescheinigung ist
von Bismarck ausgestellt worden." is okay only when I quote
somebody having said this then (prior to 1890) or if it has any
de iure relevance/repercussions today.

> It would be interesting to draw a European map of such phenomena.
>
> Willem

George