--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "aquila_grande" <aquila_grande@...>
wrote:
> In Norwegian the perfect is used in the following instances:
>
> -When an action, process or property in the past extends into the
> present. Ex: I har arbeidet som lærer i to år: - I have worked as a
> teacher in 2 years, and still do.
>
> -When an action in the past makes neccessary some action or
> attention from the listener. Ex: The horse has run away from his
> hedge. (The listener has to go out to bring it back)
>
> Is this the same way it is used in Swedish and Danish?
From a Dutch perspective this looks very English.
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".
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).
Now that we're on the subject of telling stories, the difference
between perfect and preterite comes to the fore in the use of the
tenses while relating something that happened in the past. The
preterite keeps you in the past whereas the perfect establishes some
kind of present relevance. As a consequence the perfect is usual
(though by no means mandatory) as the final link in the story. It is
also usual if you are relating, e.g., a traumatic experience you just
went through, or if it is necessary to establish precisely what
happened (e.g. in reconstructing a crime). In such cases every single
link of your story has present relevance and has to be put in the
perfect tense. If this effect is overdone the impression is that of a
drama queen talking. 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.
It would be interesting to draw a European map of such phenomena.
Willem