--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>
>
> The merger of the imperfect and perfect in the spoken language is a
> French and (South) German thing. Swiss German has almost no trace
of
> the imperfect left. The Scandinavian use of imperfect and perfect
> match those of English and Dutch
That cannot both be the case because the difference between the
English and Dutch use is big enough to cause misunderstandings and
failing grades at school.
In that connection you remark:
> (but is there a tendency in Dutch to
> use the perfect, eg. 'Ik ben hier gisteren geweest' "I was here
> yesterday"? My Dutch is getting rusty.)
They are both normal and have been so for a long time. The preterite
directs your attention towards the past and would be appropriate if
you followed it up with a story about what happened then, or if
you're musing about how extraordinarily nice things were yesterday
compared with today; whereas the perfect states that such and such an
event happened in the past and that the speaker assumes that the
hearer finds it useful or fun (etc.) to know in the present. The
presence of an adverbial expression indicating some moment in the
past does not render the use of a perfect almost impossible the way
it does in English. Aren't things that way in Danish?
Willem