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This is from high school Spanish and I don't know what I'm talking about, but I don't think the Spanish past preterite vs past imperfect distinction exists in E

This is from high school Spanish and I don't know what I'm talking about, but I don't think the Spanish past preterite vs past imperfect distinction exists in English grammer? You can of course do some things to capture them when translating to English, like sometimes use the "past progressive" in English to translate the past imperfect in Spanish -- but, then, Spanish also has a "past progressive" as a separate grammatical form too. And you probably wouldn't want to just always translate Spanish imperfect to English past progressive mechanically anyway, not for a good translation. In general I don't believe it's true that every language has exactly the same tenses, I think they actually can vary.

btilly 4y ago
Correct. Languages do NOT all have the same tenses. Chinese, for example, has no tenses. When it comes to counting tenses of languages, people disagree on how many there are. For example consider English. https://www.englishclub.com/grammar/verb-tenses.php https://www.englishclub.com/grammar/verb-tenses.php offers 12. But as noted there, it can be argued that there really are only 6. Spanish is usually said to have 16 tenses, but there is again some wiggle room. See https://www.busuu.com/en/spanish/tenses https://www.busuu.com/en/spanish/tenses.
- kerkeslager 4y ago
  I'm not a linguist but I do know both languages (English and Spanish) fairly well, and my impression is that this is mostly a semantic argument, which is based around the way we conjugate a single word. If you were very strict about only looking at the single word, English stays very simple (do=infinitive/present plural, does=present singular, doing=progressive, did=past, done=arguably not a tense because it's an adjective). If you look at it in this way, Spanish obviously has more tenses--they have six different variations of just the present tense, for example. But that doesn't capture the whole story because English does have all those tenses, English just doesn't do it in one word. Notably, there's no future tense in the one-word variations, so nobody reasonably will argue that the above is all the tenses. And that takes you to a complicated place because you can do multi-word variations in Spanish, too, and sometimes those are functionally the same (what's the difference between "voy a pagar" and "pagaré"?). And if you start allowing for multiple-word tenses, then there's a virtually unlimited number of constructions possible, and any limitation you could place on this is completely subjective. For example, your link doesn't list "I will have had been doing" as a tense, but it's obviously a grammatically correct construction with a real use--the only reason for not including it is a subjective judgment that it's too uncommon. And critically, you can do all of those in both languages, it's just a matter of how many words and how awkward/uncommon the construction will be. The different structures of the languages lead one toward preferring certain structures ("pagaré" over "voy a pagar" in Spanish, while one would likely say "I'll pay" in English because there's no one-word option). But to represent these as different tenses is pretty subjective and maybe a bit silly. The one thing I'm aware of that Spanish can do that English can't is communicate formality with a conjugation, i.e. "tú" form versus "usted" form, but I'd argue that's not a tense, because "tense" seems to be about the the temporatlity of the verb and that's a modification to accommodate the formality of the subject of the sentence.
  - jrochkind1 4y ago
    You seem to be arguing that you can communciate the same things about temporarity in all languages, and suggesting this is the same thing as saying there are the same tenses in all languages. I'm not even certain the first part is true, and would want to read a lot more about it -- but it also doesn't seem at all clear to me that these claims are synonymous. But would you think they are, that if you can communicate the same things about temporality in all languages, then that means "all languages have the same tenses"? I guess that may indeed be a semantic argument on what it means to "have a tense", but that seems an idiosyncratic meaning of "tense" to me. But then, what do you do with the simple non-controversial fact that Spanish has both past imperfect and past preterite, and English does not? Sure you can use a "past progressive" construction in English like "was walking" to, in some cases communicate the same or similar thing -- but you can say "estaba caminando" in Spanish too -- or you can instead, more commonly, say "caminaba". You have an extra choice in Spanish, an additional grammatical form with an additional shade of meaning, that does not exist in English. (and "caminaba" isn't always, or even usually, translated to English properly as "was walking", but could probably more often just be "walked" too.) This seem to be a pretty clear counter-example to the claim that all languages have the same tenses? A simple one, with an everyday construction, from a common language. (for all languages, I'd want to look at some obscure ones too!). Now, it doesn't mean that "caminaba" is untranslateable to English, there are several differnet ways you might translate it depending on context, to try to get the point across more or less ("was walking", "used to walk", "Back then I would walk", etc, and in many cases though just "walked" is fine, "I walked to work everyday") -- which is true of all translation. But this gets back to--are you actually just trying to say that all languages can express the same ideas? That's also a somewhat controversial claim, but, I think, an entirely different and broader one than "all languages have the same tenses", but can be true even if all languages don't have the same tenses.
    - kerkeslager 4y ago
      > You seem to be arguing that you can communciate the same things about temporarity in all languages, and suggesting this is the same thing as saying there are the same tenses in all languages. I'm not even certain the first part is true, and would want to read a lot more about it -- but it also doesn't seem at all clear to me that these claims are synonymous. Eh... if I had to make a claim to argue for I'd just claim that tense isn't really a clear communication of an idea that actually exists. If it's about conjugating words, then English has, what, 3 tenses (do, did, doing)? If it's about temporality, English has virtually infinite tenses, although at some point they become unwieldy ("will have had been going to have been doing"?). > But then, what do you do with the simple non-controversial fact that Spanish has both past imperfect and past preterite, and English does not? Sure you can use a "past progressive" construction in English like "was walking" to, in some cases communicate the same or similar thing -- but you can say "estaba caminando" in Spanish too -- or you can instead, more commonly, say "caminaba". You have an extra choice in Spanish, an additional grammatical form with an additional shade of meaning, that does not exist in English. (and "caminaba" isn't always, or even usually, translated to English properly as "was walking", but could probably more often just be "walked" too.) Sure, but again, doesn't English have that sort of thing? Isn't there a subtle difference between "I will pay" and "I'm going to pay", even though pretty much everything I've read would list these both as the future tense? Is that subtle difference really a "tense" or is it just that there's a separate word?

btilly 4y ago

Correct. Languages do NOT all have the same tenses. Chinese, for example, has no tenses. When it comes to counting tenses of languages, people disagree on how many there are. For example consider English. https://www.englishclub.com/grammar/verb-tenses.php https://www.englishclub.com/grammar/verb-tenses.php offers 12. But as noted there, it can be argued that there really are only 6. Spanish is usually said to have 16 tenses, but there is again some wiggle room. See https://www.busuu.com/en/spanish/tenses https://www.busuu.com/en/spanish/tenses.

kerkeslager 4y ago
I'm not a linguist but I do know both languages (English and Spanish) fairly well, and my impression is that this is mostly a semantic argument, which is based around the way we conjugate a single word. If you were very strict about only looking at the single word, English stays very simple (do=infinitive/present plural, does=present singular, doing=progressive, did=past, done=arguably not a tense because it's an adjective). If you look at it in this way, Spanish obviously has more tenses--they have six different variations of just the present tense, for example. But that doesn't capture the whole story because English does have all those tenses, English just doesn't do it in one word. Notably, there's no future tense in the one-word variations, so nobody reasonably will argue that the above is all the tenses. And that takes you to a complicated place because you can do multi-word variations in Spanish, too, and sometimes those are functionally the same (what's the difference between "voy a pagar" and "pagaré"?). And if you start allowing for multiple-word tenses, then there's a virtually unlimited number of constructions possible, and any limitation you could place on this is completely subjective. For example, your link doesn't list "I will have had been doing" as a tense, but it's obviously a grammatically correct construction with a real use--the only reason for not including it is a subjective judgment that it's too uncommon. And critically, you can do all of those in both languages, it's just a matter of how many words and how awkward/uncommon the construction will be. The different structures of the languages lead one toward preferring certain structures ("pagaré" over "voy a pagar" in Spanish, while one would likely say "I'll pay" in English because there's no one-word option). But to represent these as different tenses is pretty subjective and maybe a bit silly. The one thing I'm aware of that Spanish can do that English can't is communicate formality with a conjugation, i.e. "tú" form versus "usted" form, but I'd argue that's not a tense, because "tense" seems to be about the the temporatlity of the verb and that's a modification to accommodate the formality of the subject of the sentence.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  You seem to be arguing that you can communciate the same things about temporarity in all languages, and suggesting this is the same thing as saying there are the same tenses in all languages. I'm not even certain the first part is true, and would want to read a lot more about it -- but it also doesn't seem at all clear to me that these claims are synonymous. But would you think they are, that if you can communicate the same things about temporality in all languages, then that means "all languages have the same tenses"? I guess that may indeed be a semantic argument on what it means to "have a tense", but that seems an idiosyncratic meaning of "tense" to me. But then, what do you do with the simple non-controversial fact that Spanish has both past imperfect and past preterite, and English does not? Sure you can use a "past progressive" construction in English like "was walking" to, in some cases communicate the same or similar thing -- but you can say "estaba caminando" in Spanish too -- or you can instead, more commonly, say "caminaba". You have an extra choice in Spanish, an additional grammatical form with an additional shade of meaning, that does not exist in English. (and "caminaba" isn't always, or even usually, translated to English properly as "was walking", but could probably more often just be "walked" too.) This seem to be a pretty clear counter-example to the claim that all languages have the same tenses? A simple one, with an everyday construction, from a common language. (for all languages, I'd want to look at some obscure ones too!). Now, it doesn't mean that "caminaba" is untranslateable to English, there are several differnet ways you might translate it depending on context, to try to get the point across more or less ("was walking", "used to walk", "Back then I would walk", etc, and in many cases though just "walked" is fine, "I walked to work everyday") -- which is true of all translation. But this gets back to--are you actually just trying to say that all languages can express the same ideas? That's also a somewhat controversial claim, but, I think, an entirely different and broader one than "all languages have the same tenses", but can be true even if all languages don't have the same tenses.
  - kerkeslager 4y ago
    > You seem to be arguing that you can communciate the same things about temporarity in all languages, and suggesting this is the same thing as saying there are the same tenses in all languages. I'm not even certain the first part is true, and would want to read a lot more about it -- but it also doesn't seem at all clear to me that these claims are synonymous. Eh... if I had to make a claim to argue for I'd just claim that tense isn't really a clear communication of an idea that actually exists. If it's about conjugating words, then English has, what, 3 tenses (do, did, doing)? If it's about temporality, English has virtually infinite tenses, although at some point they become unwieldy ("will have had been going to have been doing"?). > But then, what do you do with the simple non-controversial fact that Spanish has both past imperfect and past preterite, and English does not? Sure you can use a "past progressive" construction in English like "was walking" to, in some cases communicate the same or similar thing -- but you can say "estaba caminando" in Spanish too -- or you can instead, more commonly, say "caminaba". You have an extra choice in Spanish, an additional grammatical form with an additional shade of meaning, that does not exist in English. (and "caminaba" isn't always, or even usually, translated to English properly as "was walking", but could probably more often just be "walked" too.) Sure, but again, doesn't English have that sort of thing? Isn't there a subtle difference between "I will pay" and "I'm going to pay", even though pretty much everything I've read would list these both as the future tense? Is that subtle difference really a "tense" or is it just that there's a separate word?