> And if you'd translated that
> literally, there'd have been no
> confusion! It's 'p.p.p.' in English
> too, but for 'perfect passive
> participle' as opposed to the
> 'present active participle'. But we
> usually just refer to the 3
> participles by tense.
Richard, I hope you understand that most of the terminology I get here
is in German. The usual way a German thinks, without being a
linguist, is: 1. Präsens, 2. Präteritum, 3. Perfekt (PPP) (referring
to the German verbs, of course). That's the usual way you do it in
school, but many people don't know even that, ahem.
Literal translations are not always correct. When studying English
synchronically, the PPP was always past participle for me (so I am
aware of this term). Yet my English is growing the rust now, while it
used to be more than fluent. You have to see how I reacted when a
friend of mine visited me from London. The first few sentences were
in Denglisch. :-)
Anyway, the whole idea was, the availability of the word perfect in
the naming of the verb form confused me. The confusion was only
superficial, of course.
Btw, today I heard another reading of PPP: Partizip Präteritum Passiv.
Was this a mistake? I did not have time to ask and anyway, I could
have embarrassed the guy, so I preferred to check it myself.
Eva