![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thedarkprojectEnglish is strange.
In the simple past tense, we say "I solved" but to negate it, we say "I didn't solve"? Not only do you add in the negation as you might expect, but you have to add the auxiliary verb "did" because you can't negate normal verbs (unlike French where you surround it with 'ne' and then something like 'pas' or 'jamais' to signify the type of negation), which then means the original verb gets changed to match the auxiliary, so it becomes almost a different tense entirely.
But in the future tense, you can interchange "I will solve" and "I won't solve" easily enough with no confusion. Unless you start thinking about what the hell "won't" actually stands for.
At the moment I'm trying to teach myself Old English from a book, which is actually going better than I had expected, although even back then there seem to be a lot of irregularities much like the above one in Modern English. A year or two back, I posted on here about the attempt to translate Wikipedia into Old English. Back then it was all gobbledegook to me; now I can actually get the general gist of some of the articles. Maybe it'll inspire me back into learning German eventually.
In the simple past tense, we say "I solved" but to negate it, we say "I didn't solve"? Not only do you add in the negation as you might expect, but you have to add the auxiliary verb "did" because you can't negate normal verbs (unlike French where you surround it with 'ne' and then something like 'pas' or 'jamais' to signify the type of negation), which then means the original verb gets changed to match the auxiliary, so it becomes almost a different tense entirely.
But in the future tense, you can interchange "I will solve" and "I won't solve" easily enough with no confusion. Unless you start thinking about what the hell "won't" actually stands for.
At the moment I'm trying to teach myself Old English from a book, which is actually going better than I had expected, although even back then there seem to be a lot of irregularities much like the above one in Modern English. A year or two back, I posted on here about the attempt to translate Wikipedia into Old English. Back then it was all gobbledegook to me; now I can actually get the general gist of some of the articles. Maybe it'll inspire me back into learning German eventually.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-03-04 04:48 pm (UTC)Arabic negation of the past also puts the sentence into the present tense - and interestingly, negating the future also has that effect. Then again, Arabic is sensible enough to have negating words that are different for each tense so you can tell them apart (lam + present negates the past, lan + present subjunctive negates the future...)
I intend to learn Old English one day. It's never going to be useful, but hey, it's fun.