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Huh, I just had a fairly long and fruitless conversation with ChatGPT 4 trying to understand whether this was true. ChatGPT kept insisting that romance language
by SamBam 3y ago
Huh, I just had a fairly long and fruitless conversation with ChatGPT 4 trying to understand whether this was true. ChatGPT kept insisting that romance languages distinguish between the preterite ("he did," simple past tense) and the present perfect ("he has done"), but every time I asked it to give me specific examples it would start translating them, find that they were the same, and then say "well, in Italian [or French] it's actually more about context..."
Finally it was able to give me the Spanish "Él hizo esto" vs "Él ha hecho esto," but admitted that whether one used one vs the other was quite regional.
- trealira 3y agoIn French, they only use the equivalent of the simple past tense in books, but in speech they usually only ever say the equivalent of "has done" in speech no matter the context. I don't speak French (not as a second language nor as my native language), but this is something I've read about secondhand in textbooks and online. In Spanish, they do make a distinction in neutral speech, but it's not uncommon for someone to only ever use one or the other depending on the region they're from. The auxiliary verb form ("haber hecho" / "to have done") is more common in Spain than Latin America. Though, I don't know how much we should go into this; I feel like we've kind of derailed from the original topic.