Ad
related to: past tense of comenzar german translation dictionary
Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
It is the most important tense in German. The Present tense is mainly used for simple present, present progressive, as well as for future. It is also used for historical past. Example: Ich kaufe das Auto. ("I buy the car") Preterite (Präteritum, in older works Imperfekt) – It is the past-conjugated form of the infinitive.
For many German tenses, the verb itself is locked in a non-varying form of the infinitive or past participle (which normally starts with ge-) that is the same regardless of the subject, and then joined to an auxiliary verb that is conjugated. This is similar to English grammar, though the primary verb is normally placed at the end of the clause.
The Germanic verb system carried two innovations over the previous Proto-Indo-European verb system: . Simplification to two tenses: present (also conveying future meaning) and past (sometimes called "preterite" and conveying the meaning of all of the following English forms: "I did, I have done, I had done, I was doing, I have been doing, I had been doing").
Although Standard German does not have aspects, many Upper German and all West Central German dialects, [citation needed] and some more vernacular forms of German do make an aspectual distinction which partly corresponds with the English continuous form: alongside the standard present tense Ich esse ('I eat') and past Ich aß ('I ate') there is ...
German sentence structure is the structure to which the German language adheres. The basic sentence in German follows SVO word order. [1] Additionally, German, like all west Germanic languages except English, [note 1] uses V2 word order, though only in independent clauses. In dependent clauses, the finite verb is placed last.
Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap PAST (frequently abbreviated to PST) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning.
The past tense and participle of German gehen, ging gegangen, derive from a lost verb *gangen which belongs to this class. (The verb still exists in other languages, such as the verb gang used in Scotland and northern England.) With a strong participle only: falten, salzen, spalten
A new past tense was also created in the modern languages to replace or complement the aorist and imperfect, using a periphrastic combination of the copula and the so-called "l-participle", originally a deverbal adjective. In many languages today, the copula was dropped in this formation, turning the participle itself into the past tense.