# Loss of the preterite in Italian and French



## Bléros

Does anyone know what the preterite fell out of everyday French (passé simple) and Italian (passato prossimo)? It seems like the preterite would save a lot more breath, especially in Italian and its various dialects. Saying "foi" instead of "sono stato(a)" or "je fus" instead of "j'ai été" could have maid a lot of boring conversations shorter.


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## Jana337

An Italian thread (mostly in English).


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## Bléros

Thanks a lot. This is very useful.

So I don't have to be afraid to venture into the Italian forums when my Italian is so weak right now.


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## Outsider

Bléros said:


> Does anyone know what the preterite fell out of everyday French (passé simple) and Italian (passato prossimo)? It seems like the preterite would save a lot more breath, especially in Italian and its various dialects. Saying "foi" instead of "sono stato(a)" or "je fus" instead of "j'ai été" could have maid a lot of boring conversations shorter.


In the Romance languages (and in fact in the Indo-European languages in general) there is a long trend of moving from synthetic conjugations (one-word, like _to go --> I *went*_) towards analytic ones (made with auxiliary verbs, _to go --> I *have gone*_). The shift from the simple preterite to the compound preterite is but on instance of that trend.


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## modus.irrealis

Bléros said:


> Does anyone know what the preterite fell out of everyday French (passé simple) and Italian (passato prossimo)?


I can think of two reasons why replacing the passé simple with the passé composé makes French "simpler" or "more regular" (and I'd guess the same is true of Italian). One, all verbs form the passé composé the same way, no matter what conjugation they belong to or how irregular they are, since you just take avoir/être and add the past participle. And two, although many verbs have irregular participles, you need to learn those anyway, so by dropping the passé simple, you have less irregularity overall in the system. You might also say that the passé simple sticks out in terms of the conjugation (I mean the _nous_ form doesn't even end in _-ons_!), so that might be a reason to get rid of it.

But then again, I'm not sure there's a simple linguistic answer why, because if there was some pressure to get rid of the passé simple in favour of the passé composé, why isn't this felt in all the Romance languages, or even English for that matter? Perhaps some group of people started talking that way and their speech became prestigious and others started imitating them, but I don't know if you could explain why the original change occurred. Also, I believe the same thing has happened in spoken German, and I don't think it's a coincidence that these languages which border on each other share this development.

An interesting thing is I've read that in previous centuries French grammarians gave rules about when the passé composé could be used (e.g. for events in the past 24 hours), and I was reminded of that by the usage of the Italian tenses mentioned in the thread Jana linked to, so it looks like Italian is going about this the same way French did.


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## vince

What is the situation for the preterite in the languages/dialects of southern France / northwestern Italy?


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## SerinusCanaria3075

The Italian _Passato Remoto_ (Preterite) and French _Passé Simple_ are just too irregular, which in my opinion it's the main reason to use compound tenses rather than one word.
In Spanish and Portuguese it's _so_ much easier to conjugate this tense (whereas in Ita. and Fre. you mostly see it on the Bible, for example). The tenses have not been lost, only that they are rare to hear due to the already mentioned complicity. I'm guessing that the Spanish _Pretérito_ _Simple _(Preterite) is regular 85% of the time where as in Italian (specially) is 50% or less the time you will find a regular verb to conjugate correctly.


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## modus.irrealis

SerinusCanaria3075 said:


> The Italian _Passato Remoto_ (Preterite) and French _Passé Simple_ are just too irregular, which in my opinion it's the main reason to use compound tenses rather than one word.
> In Spanish and Portuguese it's _so_ much easier to conjugate this tense


Do you really see the French passé simple as being that more complicated (don't know about Italian)? I just looked over some Spanish conjugation tables and it seems pretty equal to the French in complexity (in fact things seem to be very similar overall). I'm not sure I have an active command of the passé simple but I've never had problems passively recognizing forms in reading (except sometimes with _être_ vs. _faire_ when I'm not paying attention).

But this did make me think of another possible reason for French, the fact that regular verbs in -_ir_ don't distinguish the present from the passé simple in the singular, so _je finis, tu finis, il finit_, for example are ambiguous. This doesn't seem to apply to the other languages.


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## SerinusCanaria3075

> I just looked over some Spanish conjugation tables and it seems pretty equal to the French in complexity


You may have noticed that if a verb is irregular in any romance language, there's a chance that the verb is probably going to be irregular as well in French, Spanish...
To drink, to come, to go, to give, to live, (obviously To be/to have), are some of the most common irregular verbs in all Romance Languages.
For the most part, Spanish and Portuguese singular forms end in:
Spa: *é/í* (yo hablé/subí)- *ste* (tú hablaste/subiste)- *ó *(él habló/subió)
Por: *ei/i* (eu falei/eu subi)- *ste* (tu falaste/subiste)- *ou/eu/iu* (ele falou)

Italian 3rd person forms of the 2nd conjugation (-ere) usually have 2 options (_Dare_ for example can be _lui_ _diede_ or _lui dette_) although in the Italian bible you will hardly find _Passato Prossimo_ (composed) since it uses _Passato Remoto_ a lot (I don't know in French, if someone knows where I can find the Bible online please tell me).

The French _Passé Simple_ can end in: (singular forms, 1st 2nd And 3rd Person)
*ai/is/us/ins* (je allai/je fuis/je courus/je vins)
*as/is/us/ins* (tu allas/tu fuis/tu bus/tu vins)
*a/it/ut/int* (il alla/il fuit/ il courut/ il but/ il vint)


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## modus.irrealis

SerinusCanaria3075 said:


> The French _Passé Simple_ can end in: (singular forms, 1st 2nd And 3rd Person)
> *ai/is/us/ins* (je allai/je fuis/je courus/je vins)
> *as/is/us/ins* (tu allas/tu fuis/tu bus/tu vins)
> *a/it/ut/int* (il alla/il fuit/ il courut/ il but/ il vint)


Ah, I see what you mean, but I learned it and still see it as there being two sets of endings:

-ai -as -a -âmes -âtes -èrent (for -er verbs)
-s, -s, -t, -^mes, -^tes, -rent (for everything else, including irregular verbs)

and even these have similarities among them like Spanish and Portuguese do [Edit: although splitting up the endings this way makes other things more complicated, but I was trying to say that the endings are the same, like Spanish _habló_ and _subió_ have the same ending but the latter also has the extra _-i-_]. It just seems to me that French's passé simple is not unbearably irregular, although after what you say about _dare_ in Italian, the situation there seems different.

About the French Bible, the passé simple is used in the versions I have seen (e.g. La Bible de Louis Segond and the more recent La Bible du Semeur), but it's more generally used in any literary context, at least in the novels I have read, most of which aren't exactly contemporary though.


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## Lugubert

Approaching midnight, so I won't research extensively now. I think, though, that there is a similar phenomenon not only in Portuguese, but also in German, where the imperfect (schrieb, lief) tends to get replaced by the perfect (habe geschrieben, bin gelaufen).


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## SerinusCanaria3075

Yeah, I can see the use of the compound tenses on both versions , although they are mostly used to _emphasize_ events in the Italian version but I'll continue reading the French version to get a better perspective.
>Dieu acheva au septième jour son oeuvre, qu'il avait faite.
Dio finisce al settimo giorno il  lavoro che aveva fatto.
>Dieu bénit le septième jour et il le sanctifia...
Dio benedisse il settimo giorno e  lo consacrò...

Another problem in French would be that it might cause doubt in some cases, since _bénit_ (from Bénir) can be in the present indicative or the simple past. 
Without a doubt, the singular and plural forms can be easily distinguished in French, but notice how the 2nd person in Italian might cause confussion when learning it:
Parlare: parlai, parl*asti*, parlò, parlammo, parl*aste*, parlarono


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## cynicmystic

The influx of the Germanic tribes had a tremendous influence on the Latin language. The problem was that the conquering Germans found it difficult to master the sophisticated case endings and declensions. As a result, French, of all the Romance tongues, retained a fixed word order resembling that of German, whereas all other Romance tongues retained the flexible word order. The reason why French became more Germanized is because it served as the buffer region during the collapse of the Roman Empire. The use of auxiliary verbs for compûnd formations in Romance languages coincides with the Germanic invasion of the Roman Empire. The Italians experienced this at the hands of the Lombardo (Long Beards), whereas the Spanish suffered at the hands of Vandals and Suevs. The auxiliar form in Romance languages is essentially a Germanic structure, and represents the deep impact that the Germanic speakers left on the Latin Vulgare of the Roman Empire.

It is true that the non-auxlarly conjugation would save breath, but one has to keep in mind that the conjugation of most these verbs are irregular, and hence, difficult to learn for the Germanic conquerers.


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## Nanon

SerinusCanaria3075 said:


> The Italian _Passato Remoto_ (Preterite) and French _Passé Simple_ are just too irregular, which in my opinion it's the main reason to use compound tenses rather than one word.



At least, this is the reason many French speakers (I don't know about Italian, sorry!) would choose to explain why they avoid passé simple. Modus irrealis is right to point out that endings are homogeneous, but irregularities appear in stem shifts. Many of those shifts were present in Latin, by the way.
Since passé simple is used mostly in writing (as a past narrative tense in any literary context, even contemporary), and because of its "irregularities", it is generally considered as obsolete and difficult to learn. 
In my humble, personal and subjective opinion, it is _not_ unbearably difficult, but when you add passé simple, subjonctif imparfait and conditionnel passé 2e forme to all other spelling and grammar complexities of the French language, it is understandable that the principle of least effort prevails... in addition to the tendency towards general use of analytical tenses.



vince said:


> What is the situation for the preterite in the languages/dialects of southern France / northwestern Italy?



I am not a specialist, but to my knowledge, it is used in Occitan to a larger extent.L'occitan qu’emplega lo perfèit, quitament en la lenga de tot dia, entà parlar d'ua accion acabada e de qui la data ei coneguda (a la diferéncia deu francés qui emplega tostemps lo passat compausat).
L’occitan emploie le passé simple même dans la langue de tous les jours, pour parler d’une action achevée ou dont la date est connue (à la différence du français qui lui préfère le passé composé).
http://crdp.ac-bordeaux.fr/capoc/telecargar/pdf/JP_LIVRET_PEDAGO.pdf

De plus, l'occitan utilise      encore naturellement et couramment le passé simple ou le subjonctif imparfait...
http://mescladis.free.fr/langue-oc.htm
​


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## modus.irrealis

SerinusCanaria3075 said:


> Yeah, I can see the use of the compound tenses on both versions , although they are mostly used to _emphasize_ events in the Italian version but I'll continue reading the French version to get a better perspective.
> >Dieu acheva au septième jour son oeuvre, qu'il avait faite.
> Dio finisce al settimo giorno il  lavoro che aveva fatto.


But in this example, a compound tense is the only possibility, no? Only Romanian I believe has kept the Latin synthetic pluperfect.



Nanon said:


> In my humble, personal and subjective opinion, it is _not_ unbearably difficult, but when you add passé simple, subjonctif imparfait and conditionnel passé 2e forme to all other spelling and grammar complexities of the French language, it is understandable that the principle of least effort prevails... in addition to the tendency towards general use of analytical tenses.


But just to add and clarify what I was trying to say before, I don't think this is a sufficient reason for the change because other languages don't feel the need to lose these tenses (I think Italian still preserves the imperfect subjunctive?)



cynicmystic said:


> The influx of the Germanic tribes had a tremendous influence on the Latin language. The problem was that the conquering Germans found it difficult to master the sophisticated case endings and declensions. As a result, French, of all the Romance tongues, retained a fixed word order resembling that of German, whereas all other Romance tongues retained the flexible word order. The reason why French became more Germanized is because it served as the buffer region during the collapse of the Roman Empire. The use of auxiliary verbs for compûnd formations in Romance languages coincides with the Germanic invasion of the Roman Empire.


I'm not sure we can blame the Germanic tribes here, since they spoke very synthetic languages at the time. And German, by the way, does not have a fixed word order -- and the rules it does have for word order are very different than any in French. But about compound tenses, are compound perfect tenses found earlier in the Germanic languages than in the Romance languages? Old English, for example, did not have a compound perfect, so perhaps the influence in this area was the other way. And for the question at hand, Germanic invasions can't explain why French abandoned the passé simple in speech a thousand years later.


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## cynicmystic

German does have a fixed word order in the sense that English does. You cannot say, for example, 'to the going bank am I' in English. Neither can you say 'bank I am going to the'. 

Additionally, if it is not the Germanic tongues that one should blame for the fixed word order of French, then who should we blame? The Eskimos? Why do you think that French is the only Romance tongue that has a fixed word order among Spanish, Italian, Portugese and Romanian?

Regarding Rumenian, I never mentioned the pluperfect, and do not see how that has any relevance to our discussion? Do I need to mention that Rumenian is heavily slavized.



modus.irrealis said:


> But in this example, a compound tense is the only possibility, no? Only Romanian I believe has kept the Latin synthetic pluperfect.
> 
> 
> But just to add and clarify what I was trying to say before, I don't think this is a sufficient reason for the change because other languages don't feel the need to lose these tenses (I think Italian still preserves the imperfect subjunctive?)
> 
> 
> I'm not sure we can blame the Germanic tribes here, since they spoke very synthetic languages at the time. And German, by the way, does not have a fixed word order -- and the rules it does have for word order are very different than any in French. But about compound tenses, are compound perfect tenses found earlier in the Germanic languages than in the Romance languages? Old English, for example, did not have a compound perfect, so perhaps the influence in this area was the other way. And for the question at hand, Germanic invasions can't explain why French abandoned the passé simple in speech a thousand years later.


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## modus.irrealis

cynicmystic said:


> German does have a fixed word order in the sense that English does. You cannot say, for example, 'to the going bank am I' in English. Neither can you say 'bank I am going to the'.


This post gives some examples of possible word orders in German. German has a verb second rule (in main clauses) and there's nothing like that in either French or English.



> Additionally, if it is not the Germanic tongues that one should blame for the fixed word order of French, then who should we blame? The Eskimos? Why do you think that French is the only Romance tongue that has a fixed word order among Spanish, Italian, Portugese and Romanian?


Why does it have to be another language that caused it and not just the internal development of the language? And wait, you're saying German has a fixed word order but the Romance languages other than French don't? How exactly are you defining "fixed word order?"



> Regarding Rumenian, I never mentioned the pluperfect, and do not see how that has any relevance to our discussion? Do I need to mention that Rumenian is heavily slavized.


I didn't mention Romanian in my response to your comments.


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## cynicmystic

Are you suggesting that German has a flexible word order as in Turkish, Japanese, Italian etc? Somehow, I don't think so. Does it ever show the flexibility of Altaic tongues in the true sense of a flexible syntax? I doubt that.



modus.irrealis said:


> This post gives some examples of possible word orders in German. German has a verb second rule (in main clauses) and there's nothing like that in either French or English.
> 
> Why does it have to be another language that caused it and not just the internal development of the language? And wait, you're saying German has a fixed word order but the Romance languages other than French don't? How exactly are you defining "fixed word order?"
> 
> I didn't mention Romanian in my response to your comments.


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## modus.irrealis

cynicmystic said:


> Are you suggesting that German has a flexible word order as in Turkish, Japanese, Italian etc? Somehow, I don't think so. Does it ever show the flexibility of Altaic tongues in the true sense of a flexible syntax? I doubt that.


As Italian? It certainly seems so. Does Italian have word orders like "Den Fisch aß der Hund"? (And Turkish and Japanese are not the best examples of a flexible syntax "in the true sense" since they have standard word orders, but that's another topic.)


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## Nanon

modus.irrealis said:


> But just to add and clarify what I was trying to say before, I don't think this is a sufficient reason for the change because other languages don't feel the need to lose these tenses (I think Italian still preserves the imperfect subjunctive?)



These tenses are lost in speech, but the passé simple is not lost in writing. Passé simple is felt to be easily replaced by passé composé, with the same sense. 
However, what always puzzles me is that in a Cartesian country like France , the imperfect subjunctive is seen as obsolete and is gradually disappearing even from writing. Replacing it with the present subjunctive creates an incoherence in the tense sequence... 



modus.irrealis said:


> But then again, I'm not sure there's a simple linguistic answer why, because if there was some pressure to get rid of the passé simple in favour of the passé composé, why isn't this felt in all the Romance languages, or even English for that matter? Perhaps some group of people started talking that way and their speech became prestigious and others started imitating them, but I don't know if you could explain why the original change occurred.



This may not be the only explanation to this fact, but it is likely that the disappearance of the passé simple in favour of the passé composé started several centuries ago. With the centralising linguistic policy of the French state and the pressure to eradicate patois and regional languages (where the passé simple is used in speech, see my previous post about Occitan - but there are more examples), the passé composé gradually became the "standard" form.

As a consequence, there is also some pressure on teachers and children's books. About 20 years ago, the French minister of education wanted to suppress the passé simple from primary school syllabuses. I don't think his proposal was applied (reforms come and go), but primary school teachers are encouraged to favour the passé composé. I also learnt that series of children's books (namely several titles of the "Bibliothèque rose", for children aged 8 - 10) had been rewritten with the passé composé. Luckily (at least IMHO), children are not stupid and they feel the magic of a tale told with the passé simple.


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## radagasty

modus.irrealis said:


> This post gives some examples of possible word orders in German. German has a verb second rule (in main clauses) and there's nothing like that in either French or English.


 
I wouldn't go so far as to say that there is 'nothing like that' in French or English. For example, there remain vestiges of the old verb-second rule in modern English, principally with negative adverbs, e.g., 'Never have I ...' or 'No sooner had he...', etc. Middle French, too, had a verb-second rule.


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## modus.irrealis

Nanon said:


> These tenses are lost in speech, but the passé simple is not lost in writing. Passé simple is felt to be easily replaced by passé composé, with the same sense.


Of course -- I was thinking in terms of the spoken language.



> However, what always puzzles me is that in a Cartesian country like France , the imperfect subjunctive is seen as obsolete and is gradually disappearing even from writing. Replacing it with the present subjunctive creates an incoherence in the tense sequence...


That is puzzling -- the imperfect subjunctive doesn't seem to have any extra irregularity, since its forms seem to be derived from simple past fairly straightforwardly, so it is unclear why literary French would keep one but not the other. Maybe it's just the written language "catching up" with the spoken language but then is the simple past sadly slowly on its way out as well?



> This may not be the only explanation to this fact, but it is likely that the disappearance of the passé simple in favour of the passé composé started several centuries ago. With the centralising linguistic policy of the French state and the pressure to eradicate patois and regional languages (where the passé simple is used in speech, see my previous post about Occitan - but there are more examples), the passé composé gradually became the "standard" form.


Yes, that makes a lot of sense to me to explain why it spread, and with the prestige of French perhaps it influenced the languages outside France as well.



> Luckily (at least IMHO), children are not stupid and they feel the magic of a tale told with the passé simple.


Even for me, having learned French as a second language, I "expect" to see the passé simple in literary works, although to a great extent that's because in high school we read works by Flaubert, Maupassant, and so on, so that's what I'm used to. I wonder, though, do translations of things like Harry Potter use the passé simple?



radagasty said:


> I wouldn't go so far as to say that there is 'nothing like that' in French or English. For example, there remain vestiges of the old verb-second rule in modern English, principally with negative adverbs, e.g., 'Never have I ...' or 'No sooner had he...', etc. Middle French, too, had a verb-second rule.


Interesting. I never thought of connecting those kinds of inversions with a verb-second rule, mostly because other kinds of movement in English don't result in verb-second position (e.g. "This I know"). But did English ever develop a full-fledge rigorous verb-second rule, because I know Old English was very flexible in this regard?


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## jazyk

> But in this example, a compound tense is the only possibility, no? Only Romanian I believe has kept the Latin synthetic pluperfect.


Romanian and Portuguese have that tense, and sometimes Spanish uses the imperfect of the subjunctive ending in -ra to give it an archaic touch as well:

Romanian: A scris/scrise cu creionul pe care îl cumpărase.
Portuguese: Escreveu com o lápis que comprara.
Spanish: Escribió con el lápiz que comprara.
English: He wrote with the pencil that he had bought.

Cumpărase and comprara mean had bought.

I'd never say those sentences in Portuguese or Spanish, even though they are technically correct. I'd rather say:
Portuguese: Escreveu com o lápis que tinha/havia comprado.
Spanish: Escribió con el lápiz que había comprado.

Jazyk


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## modus.irrealis

jazyk said:


> Romanian and Portuguese have that tense, and sometimes Spanish uses the imperfect of the subjunctive ending in -ra to give it an archaic touch as well:


Thanks for the correction. Is the Spanish formation, despite its name, historically the same as the Portuguese formation?



> I'd never say those sentences in Portuguese or Spanish, even though they are technically correct. I'd rather say:


This seems analogous to the loss/restriction of the simple past in Italian and French. I wonder what the reasons are behind this change in Portuguese and whether they can somewhat explain the situation in the other languages. (Although, come to think of it, even in English the perfect tense has some limited use as a simple past, in the infinitive for example: "he seems to have done it" can be "it seems he did it" as well as "it seems he has done it", but I'm at a loss to explain why this loss of perfect aspect now seems to be fairly easy for the compound tense.)


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## jazyk

> Thanks for the correction. Is the Spanish formation, despite its name, historically the same as the Portuguese formation?


Yes, it is. Both come from the Latin pluperfect of the indicative.



> This seems analogous to the loss/restriction of the simple past in Italian and French. I wonder what the reasons are behind this change in Portuguese and whether they can somewhat explain the situation in the other languages.


It's still used in literary Portughese, though, and sometimes in journalistic texts as well.


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## demalaga

It's true that in common speach the preterite simple has been losing ground in Italian and French, but they are still used in more formal language.Asking about the reasons of this is not easy to answer.You know, in the evolution of languages you cannot foresee whats going to happen next and any explanation about why something happenned or not is allways a personal interpretation.
The reasons that have been adduced in this thread could also aply to other languages, but in fact things went the other way round.
For example in Portuguese is used only the simple form.
In Spanish are used both forms, but in Argentina it seems to me they use almost exclusively the simple form.
In Catalan are both used, but whats more strange a new compound form has been introduced (coexisting with the both forms in use) with to verb anar (To Go) as auxiliary.So in one place you hear "Ell arribà"(He arrived) and some kilometers more to the South you hear "Ell va arribar".


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## Lugubert

demalaga said:


> In Catalan are both used, but whats more strange a new compound form has been introduced (coexisting with the both forms in use) with to verb anar (To Go) as auxiliary.So in one place you hear "Ell arribà"(He arrived) and some kilometers more to the South you hear "Ell va arribar".


Strange indeed! I would unhesitatingly have taken the latter example as future (unless context would have made me just utterly confused).


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## demalaga

"Ell va dir" means "he said"
"Ell va a dir" means "he is going to say"
"nosaltres varem dir"  means"We said"
"nosaltres anem a dir " means "We are going to say"
But this are forms of Oriental Catalan (Lleida, etc..)


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## Outsider

Lugubert said:


> Approaching midnight, so I won't research extensively now. I think, though, that there is a similar phenomenon not only in Portuguese, but also in German, where the imperfect (schrieb, lief) tends to get replaced by the perfect (habe geschrieben, bin gelaufen).


Not in Portuguese.


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## Outsider

cynicmystic said:


> The influx of the Germanic tribes had a tremendous influence on the Latin language. The problem was that the conquering Germans found it difficult to master the sophisticated case endings and declensions. As a result, French, of all the Romance tongues, retained a fixed word order resembling that of German, whereas all other Romance tongues retained the flexible word order. The reason why French became more Germanized is because it served as the buffer region during the collapse of the Roman Empire. The use of auxiliary verbs for compûnd formations in Romance languages coincides with the Germanic invasion of the Roman Empire. The Italians experienced this at the hands of the Lombardo (Long Beards), whereas the Spanish suffered at the hands of Vandals and Suevs. The auxiliar form in Romance languages is essentially a Germanic structure, and represents the deep impact that the Germanic speakers left on the Latin Vulgare of the Roman Empire.
> 
> It is true that the non-auxlarly conjugation would save breath, but one has to keep in mind that the conjugation of most these verbs are irregular, and hence, difficult to learn for the Germanic conquerers.


I think you have confused fixed word order with mandatory subject. In French, the subject of a sentence must be stated, even when it's a pronoun. In other Romance languages, subject pronouns can often be omitted when they are clear from context. This is another similarity with the Germanic languages. However, I would be cautious not to assume immedietaly that the cause of this feaure of French is Germanic influence (at least, by itself). It seems to me that one important reason why the subjet must be made explicit in French is because verb conjugations have been so eroded that they're often homophonous. E.g. *je disais, tu disais, il disait*, where, despite the spelling, the verb is pronounced exactly the same way in all three; and in the plural there is also *ils disaient*, again pronounced like _disais_. So, if you want to distinguish one subject from another you need the subject _pronoun_, whereas in most other Romance languages you can tell the subject from the personal desinence in the _verb_.

I also think you have overplayed the effect of the Germanic languages on the Romance languages. Certainly, there was some influence, and it's difficult to tell exactly how much of it, but many of the changes that produced the Romance languages were already brewing in Vulgar Latin prior to the 5th century. For example, compound verbs, or compound-like modal constructions, can be found even in classical authors. And the Latin passive voice was already partly compound. (Contrary to all the hype, even Latin was not a completely synthetic language.)


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## J.F. de TROYES

demalaga said:


> In Spanish are used both forms, but in Argentina it seems to me they use almost exclusively the simple form.


 
Not only in Argentina, but in most of (maybe all )South-American countries the only perfect simple is used.


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## Bléros

I didn't know this topic would get this big. Anyway, I think the passé composé and the passato remoto were favored over the passé simple and the passato prossimo because of the irregularity and ambiguity. In Latin, the perfect tense only signifies a complete action, and once the compound tenses came into being, the perfect tense became a guess, a twin to the present perfect. So, _amā(vi)stī_ meant the same thing as _habuistī amātō_. The compound pluperfect (like _j'avais eu_ or _io avevo avuto_) eliminated the synthetic Latin pluperfect (_ego habueram_). The compound future perfect (like _j'aurai eu_ or _io avrò avuto_) replaced the synthetic the Latin future perfect (_ego habuerō_). So, it would seem natural to do away with the simple past, even though it took quite a while for it to be wiped out of everyday spoke language.


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## konungursvia

I think it is a combination of causes... I'll give my opinion in terms of French. As the language was perpetuated among successive generations of illiterate people, accompanied by the loss of the pronounced final consonant and the increasing reliance on the seventeen or eighteen distinct vowels, many regular preterites became tricky to distinguish from one another > _vit / fit ... etc. _If the listener did not hear perfectly, it would be rather unclear what was said. Furthermore, it took a language-lover to keep all these preterite monosyllables on the tip of one's tongue. When you hear the passé simple spoken, you have to think and sort and compute for a half second before you decide which verb you actually heard. The passé composé, on the other hand, spreads the same meaning over a larger number of syllables and phonemes, making it easier to hear, and decreasing the resemblance of each utterance with other verbs that differ in meaning: 
_a vu / a fait_ .... these extremely common verbs no longer sound alike. In short, it is a tendency towards more redundancy, much like checksums in modern data transmissions, that explains the phenomenon, in my view; just as Chinese, once full of monosyllabic words, now relies mostly on diads or two-syllable utterances. These are more intelligible when dealing with a variety of uneducated or foreign persons in business and trade.


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## radagasty

modus.irrealis said:


> Interesting. I never thought of connecting those kinds of inversions with a verb-second rule, mostly because other kinds of movement in English don't result in verb-second position (e.g. "This I know"). But did English ever develop a full-fledge rigorous verb-second rule, because I know Old English was very flexible in this regard?


 
Sorry... I missed this part of your post earlier, and hence neglected to reply.

Ahh... the much-vaunted flexibility of Old English! It really depends on what precisely you mean by 'full-fledged' and 'rigorous', but the answer would almost certainly have to be NO. I should point out at this stage at Old High German did not have such a 'full-fledged and rigorous rule' either. 

Both OE and OHG had a verb-second constraint, but this was manifest merely as a tendency, and not a hard-and-fast rule. As I mentioned earlier, verb-second following a negative adverbial is one of the few vestiges left in Modern English. Let's take such sentences as an example, and look at their word order.

In both OE and OHG this tendency was much stronger, and the majority of sentences introduced by an adverbial did have the verb second. (Note that even in modern English, this behaviour is not restricted to negative adverbials, certain positive ones, like 'so' and 'as', and also in fossilised expressions like 'long live the King', are found.)

_Đa beeode heo sume dæge þurh nytennysse into ðam scræfe þæs eadigan Benedictes._

_In themo tage giengun zi imo Sadducei._

There are, of course, many counter-examples, and the weight of the elements, at least in OE, has a strong influence on the verb-second rule, so there are many instances where it is unclear if it is being violated, e.g., in sentences where a light adverbial is inserted between the subject and the verb.

At any rate, suffice it to say, the OHG verb-second tendency developed into a rigorous rule, whereas that of OE weakened as the language evolve.


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## Arrius

The Preterite or Passé Simple is alive and well in writing and, in case anybody failed to notice the fact in earlier posts, still essential to French literature. It still turns up occasionally in courtroom speeches, and I have heard there remain vestiges of it in the dialect of Auvergne.
The Simple Past and Perfect in Spanish on the other hand, are virtually interchangeable, as one sees in the Spanish subtitles of DVD's when a character may be using the Perfect but the subtitles use the Preterite for the same verb, simply because it will fit in better at the bottom of the screen without alterating the sense.
By the way, *cynimystic,* as regards:
*German does have a fixed word order in the sense that English does. You cannot say, for example, 'to the going bank am I' in English. Neither can you say 'bank I am going to the'.* 
There may well be something energetically to refute here, but I don't really know what it means. Did you forget to write _not _after the first _does_? Please elucidate.


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## Outsider

Arrius said:
			
		

> The Simple Past and Perfect in Spanish on the other hand, are virtually interchangeable [...]


That's completely false. The simple past is much more alive in Spanish than it is in French!


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## modus.irrealis

radagasty said:


> Sorry... I missed this part of your post earlier, and hence neglected to reply.


No problem -- thanks for the explanation. My grammar basically says that has three orders for Subject and Verb, SV, VS, and S...V, and doesn't speak in terms of verb-second, but looking that the examples SV and VS often do result in verb-second sentences.


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## Arrius

Originally Posted by *Arrius* 
The Simple Past and Perfect in Spanish on the other hand, are virtually interchangeable [...]

*That's completely false. The simple past is much more alive in Spanish than it is in French!* *Outsider*

I think you had better read what I said again, and if you still have any doubts, compare the Spanish soundtrack on a DVD with the accompanying subtitles in Spanish. The spoken and written texts are nearly always a little different, and sometimes the soundtrack has the Perfect when the subtitles have the Simple past (Preterite), sometimes vice versa, and sometimes both have the same form of the verb.  
It is not in your quote of me, but I also said that the French Preterite was very much alive _in_ _writing_ (i.e. in literature, not letters home). I did not compare its popularity with the equivalent Spanish form.


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## Outsider

The simple past and the present perfect are _not_ "virtually interchangeable" in standard Spanish. 

There are certainly dialects that prefer one of them over the other, and in those regional varieties of Spanish you might say that the tenses are interchangeable, but that is by no means the general rule.



> Pese a tratarse de una distinción sutil e incluso en zonas limítrofes algo borrosa, la diferencia entre ambos tiempos se da claramente en la lengua literaria y se mantiene con bastante reguralidd en la lengua hablada de la Península. [...] En el habla vulgar de Madrid es, en cambio, la forma compuesta la que tiende a desplazar a la simple.
> 
> Pretérito perfecto simple y compuesto
> en España y en Hispanoamérica
> © Justo Fernández López


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## Arrius

When I used the term "virtually", I naturally did not mean "exclusively" . And, hardly surprisingly, neither did I take into consideration the madrileño equivalent of Cockney or the kind of Spanish under the influence of various Spanish dialects or Portuguese. 
To see what is done _in practice _in standard spoken Spanish, I suggest you tune your satellite TV to "Los Simpson(s)" some day at two o'clock on Antena 3, and witness the correspondence I have described between the spoken dialogue and the "subtitulos para sordos". And don't say that doesn't count because the script is translated from the American, because the Spanish is excellent (and Iberian), as one would expect from a multi-million dollar enterprise.


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## Outsider

Arrius said:
			
		

> And don't say that doesn't count because the script is translated from the American, because the Spanish is excellent (and Iberian), as one would expect from a multi-million dollar enterprise.


I would never say that, but what I would say is that it doesn't count because you are taking the _English_ way of using the present perfect as the standard for _Spanish_. Has it ever occured to you that perhaps this tense is employed a little differently in the two languages?


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## Arrius

*the English way of using the present perfect is the standard for Spanish.* 
*Outsider*
I cannot imagine where you got that idea from - I am speechless, and shall remain so, at least as far as this thread is concerned.
Até logo,* A.*


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## Outsider

It seemed like the only possible interpretation of:



			
				Arrius said:
			
		

> [...] one sees in the Spanish subtitles of DVD's when a character may be using the Perfect but the subtitles use the Preterite for the same verb [...]


If you meant something else, then please explain your argument better. It makes no sense otherwise.

Of course, whatever your argument might be, your conclusion is still wrong: the simple past and the present perfect are not interchangeable in any way in Spanish.


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## Joannes

Outsider said:


> It seemed like the only possible interpretation of:
> 
> 
> 
> Arrius said:
> 
> 
> 
> [...]one sees in the Spanish subtitles of DVD's when a character may be using the Perfect but the subtitles use the Preterite for the same verb[...]
> 
> 
> 
> 
> If you meant something else, then please explain your argument better. It makes no sense otherwise.
Click to expand...

 
He means in the intralingual difference



Arrius said:


> between the spoken dialogue *[in (dubbed) Spanish]* and the "subtitulos *para sordos*".


 
So between spoken and written language basically...

(I agree that this wasn't made very explicit by Arrius (at first). I suppose he just didn't consider interlingual subtitles, which is the more common practice in Portugal (and Belgium ).)


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## Outsider

Oh! My apologies to Arrius. I hadn't realised you were comparing the spoken dialogue with the subtitles.


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## Arrius

Despite my promise to say nothing further on this thread, because it seemed futile to do so, it would be most churlish of me not to welcome your quite unexpected apologies with open arms and assure you of my camaraderie and cooperation in any future joint deliberations and disquisitions. But let us all, including myself, remember first to read very carefully in future any post we reply to, especially if it is to refute categorically what has been said. obrigado A.


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## olaszinho

Hi, I would say that the Italian simple past is still widely used particularly in Tuscany and in the south. Besides it's used in the written language: novels, newpapers, magazines. Generally educated people tend to use it when they talk in a more formal way. In some regions like Tuscany Lazio Abruzzo both past tenses ( simple and compound) are used, more or less like in some Spanish areas. Just in the north of Italy the simple past is totally disappeared like in French (spoken language) and Romanian. I Know French, Spanish and Portuguese and I have to say that the Italian passato Remoto is much more irreguliar than in the other languages. In my view the French passé simple is not that hard.
Bye


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## curly

modus.irrealis said:


> I wonder, though, do translations of things like Harry Potter use the passé simple?




They do Or at least Harry Potter does. If I recall correctly Twilight, the contents of which I'd rather not talk about, doesn't.


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## Favara

The same happened in Catalan... We've lost _pretèrit perfet simple_ (except in a small area around the city of València), and use _pretèrit perfet perifràstic _("to go" + infinitive) instead._

Aní, parlares, trobà_ -> _vaig anar, vas/vares parlar, va trobar_.
~=(I went, you talked, he found -> "I go + to go", "you go + to talk", "he goes + to find")


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## XiaoRoel

En *Gallego* ni existe el perfecto perifrástico con auxiliar, ya que *no existen las formas de perfecto con auxiliar*, _se conserva el sistema del latín, perfecto y pluscuamperfecto_. Hay una _perífrasis perfectiva_ (no un tiempo compuesto) que puede traducir al gallego algún valor de esos tiempos perfectos con auxiliar: la perífrasis ter + participio. Los tiempos con _haver_, más normales en Brasil que en Portugal están en _proceso de creación_ de tiempos de la conjugación, pero todavía el proceso no está _ni mucho menos completo_, ya que es un _hecho reciente de lengua, _como_ reciente _es su_ integración en el paradigma verbal en español (s. XVII-XVIII)._


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## Erick404

I've read several posts attributing the preference for compound tenses instead of simple ones to irregularity. 
While irregularity is indeed present in many verbs, as far as I know (I know very little French and almost nothing of Italian), almost any speaker of these languages, even if not very educated, understands perfectly what they mean.
That makes me have some resistance to accept this explanation. Unless one would say that the real difficulty with irregular forms was that of barbarian conquerors learning Middle French/Italian, and their way of speaking (with compound tenses) became standard. But this is just a random mix of what I've read here. 

Also, there's the Portuguese pluperfect, already mentioned in this thread. It may be formed with a single verb or as a compound, and only the compound is used in spoken language, despite the synthetical forms being quite regular.


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## Meyer Wolfsheim

There is no doubt that the simple past tense (the preterite) is much quicker and "analytically" simpler than using a compound tense, like the present perfect.  The French forms of the preterite are quite irregular and phonologically very confusing at times and in reality it would seem that an auxiliary construction for talking about the simple past is easier.  There are times when I speak French where I desperately want to use the preterite form of être but then I recall I need to stick with an avoir construction.  

I see no waning of the preterite in Modern English and in fact it is a much stronger tense than the present perfect (it carries more feeling/power).  The two are NOT interchangeable and there are important distinctions; times when only the preterite works and times when only the present perfect does.  

Personally, I used to dislike avoir constructions when I learned French as I had learned Spanish before that.  But now I have switched and use the present perfect much more often than I used to when speaking Spanish.  It is simply much easier in terms of constructing the tense.  As pointed out, there is some sort of trend towards general simplification in European languages.  All new verbs in most languages are regular and new nouns imported often only take on one gender collectively.  This shift from a synthetic tense construction to a very analytical one is no surprise, though I doubt it will happen in English as the difference between the two is very much alive and known by natives.  

As already said, the auxiliary form allows speakers to take a verb they already use all the time (usually to have or sometimes to be) and line it up with a past construct which does not agree with person, number, etc. and simply tells the speaker that it is a past form.  

To use Spanish for example, there are a very limited number of irregular past participles.  To use the past all one needs to know is those irregular ones, have memorized the forms of haber, and then know that -ir/-er verbs become -ido and -ar verbs become -ado.  And there you have it!  

However, to form the preterite is much more complex.  There are many irregular forms and you have to not only memorize them (e, iste, o, imos, isteis, ieron) but also-ar (é, aste, ó, amos, ásteis,aron), er/ir (í, iste, ió, imos, ísteis, ieron)


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## clevermizo

My impression is that the presento perfecto is more common in general in Spain, but I'm not certain. Perhaps a native Spaniard can comment.

In Latin America, the pretérito is alive and well, as is the imperfecto del subjuntivo which is exclusively found in the -ra found, not the -se form (at least in speech). Furthermore, I think in Latin America the pretérito dominates as the "past/perfective" tense, over the presente perfecto which is relegated to a number of contexts. 

I don't think the passé simple is any more difficult or irregular in French than the pretérito is in Spanish, and there are likely a number of influences which caused it to dominate. I think that its having made the (spoken) French past conjugation "easier" is perhaps too easy of an argument. 

There's actually a good book to pick up on the subject:
Sémantique et diachronie du système verbal français. Edited by EMMANUELLE LABEAU, CARL VETTERS and PATRICK CAUDAL. (Cahiers Chronos, 16). Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2007. 

I haven't read it myself, but for those interested. There's a short review of it in J. French Studies 62:1, p 122.

In this paper: 

Ranson, D. _Variable Subject Expression in Old and Middle French Prose Texts: The Role of Verbal Ambiguity_, Romance Quarterly 56:1, Winter 2009.

it is appears that use passé simple is statistically correlated to the use of null subject in older texts. I just briefly skimmed the paper. Apparently in Middle French texts it was more common to use a subject pronoun with the passé composé than it was to use it with the passé simple. In other words, the subject pronoun was "more" pro-drop with the passé simple forms. In the corpus analyzed, subject pronouns were only used about 30% of the time with passé simple forms, compared to other verb forms studied (in which pronouns are used 69% of the time). At the end, the hypothesis is put forward that fixed subject pronouns and loss of passé simple in spoken French may have gone hand in hand, however this is not the question of particular interest in the paper. The paper is mostly concerned with the situation of pro-drop in Middle/Old French texts. However, there may be more research on the coincidence of fixed pronouns and loss of (spoken) passé simple. But if fixed subject pronouns were somehow syntactically "attached" to "preferred" tenses, this argument makes sense.

I'm not really knowledgeable about this subject enough myself, but just figured I'd share my quick perusing of literature.


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## Arrius

@ clevermizo
In order fully to understand your last post, may I ask you to explain what is meant by a _*fixed pronoun*_ and _*post-drop*_? I feel sure that many native English speakers let alone non-native speakers are ignorant of these terms even if they have read many books on linguistics, as I myself have done. I do not believe that this query breaks any rule that might result in its deletion.


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## trance0

I believe a 'fixed pronoun' is a pronoun that is a part of a verb and determines which person a verb is in. Some languages have verbs that demand 'fixed pronouns' (like French, English or German) and some languages are 'pro-drop'(=pronouns are not necessarily used with verbs, because verb endings sufficiently determine person and number), like for example Spanish, Portuguese or Slavic languages.


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## clevermizo

Arrius said:


> @ clevermizo
> In order fully to understand your last post, may I ask you to explain what is meant by a _*fixed pronoun*_ and _*post-drop*_? I feel sure that many native English speakers let alone non-native speakers are ignorant of these terms even if they have read many books on linguistics, as I myself have done. I do not believe that this query breaks any rule that might result in its deletion.



A fixed subject pronoun refers to the fact that the subject pronoun is always or usually written with the verb (Je sais, and not *sais). This is like in English (I have, but not just *have).

I didn't write "post-drop" so I don't know what you're referring to. If it's about "pro-drop", that refers to the tendency in say modern Spanish _not_ to have a fixed subject pronoun: Sé commonly, but also yo sé under certain contexts. Middle and Old French also allowed this, whereas modern French typically requires the subject pronoun. Spanish also prefers _not_ using the subject pronoun in certain contexts (say, impersonal ones), whereas modern French still requires a pronoun (_está lloviendo_, but French _il pleut_ and English _it's raining_, not *_pleut_ and *_is raining_).

The second work I cite was, again, studying the nature of the subject pronoun in Middle and Old French texts, statistically determining if with certain verb tenses it was more commonly dropped or kept, since in modern times the subject pronoun is always written. It is simply a hypothesis subject to further investigation put forward at the end that the loss of passé simple in speech which seems to be statistically correlated with pro-drop tendencies, may have gone by the way-side as the language moved towards "needing subject pronouns all the time" (in plainer English). 

In some senses this makes sense. It would be weird to have one verb tense in which it was ok to drop the subject pronoun, but almost all others in which it was not. If in Middle French or late Middle French (which I do not know myself), the passé compose was additionally more or less equivalent with the passé simple (as in varieties of spoken Spanish as you've brought up previously in this thread), then this would have further promoted the passé simple's loss. 

There are a lot of factors as have been discussed in this thread. I assume some suite of them lead to its loss.


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## jmx

clevermizo said:


> My impression is that the presento perfecto is more common in general in Spain, but I'm not certain. Perhaps a native Spaniard can comment.


In Spain, except the Canaries, both the perfect and the preterite are used in any context, formal or informal (with some particularities in bilingual northwestern areas), but the "grammatical function distribution" is different than in Latin America, so we use the perfect in some cases where a Latinamerican would use the preterite.


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## Angelo di fuoco

curly said:


> They do Or at least Harry Potter does. If I recall correctly Twilight, the contents of which I'd rather not talk about, doesn't.



If I recall correctly, _Twilight_ does use passé simple, but I can't recall any example of _imparfait du subjonctif_ in neither of the books.
However, there are writers such as Amélie Nothomb who use it quite frequently (my subjective impression: in 50 % of the cases in which one would expect a _concordance des temps au subjonctif_ in older French literature).


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## Hulalessar

jmartins said:


> In Spain, except the Canaries, both the perfect and the preterite are used in any context, formal or informal (with some particularities in bilingual northwestern areas), but the "grammatical function distribution" is different than in Latin America, so we use the perfect in some cases where a Latinamerican would use the preterite.



As a non-native Spanish speaker resident in Spain, that accords with my impression of what happens in Spain, though I would suggest that in writing the distinction between preterite and perfect is kept and more or less corresponds to the distinction made in English between the past (_I lived_) and the perfect (_I have lived_). Further, I think that in speech there is a tendency to use the preterite if the action is felt to be well in the past without any persisting consequences, but to use the perfect if the action was recent.


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## clevermizo

jmartins said:


> In Spain, except the Canaries, both the perfect and the preterite are used in any context, formal or informal (with some particularities in bilingual northwestern areas), but the "grammatical function distribution" is different than in Latin America, so we use the perfect in some cases where a Latinamerican would use the preterite.



Gracias, es lo que pensé......err..... he pensado?


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## Angelo di fuoco

¿pensaba/estaba pensando?


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## clevermizo

Angelo di fuoco said:


> ¿pensaba/estaba pensando?



Actually pensaba's more appropriate, but it ruins my joke.


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## sokol

Hulalessar said:


> Further, I think that in speech there is a tendency to use the preterite if the action is felt to be well in the past without any persisting consequences, but to use the perfect if the action was recent.


I had two Spanish teachers, one was from Spain (from Castilia somewhere north of Madrid), the other one was Mexican.

My Spanish teacher had no problems at all using perfecto = perfect for past actions which she felt were rather recent or "connected" to the present while else she used preterite = indefinido: she corrected all errors we made very consistently.

However, my Mexican teacher sometimes told us, when _*we students*_ used indefinido incorrectly (for actions which still have a connection with the present), that this were "colloquial speech" of Mexicans and that in correct standard language we should use perfecto: so even though she of course knew the norms for peninsular Spanish she didn't think that this use of indefinido for "near past" events was incorrect - she only considered it being a regional Mexican feature.

Our Mexican teacher didn't give us any rules for when they use indefinido in cases where Spaniards will use perfecto but that's anyway not the original question of this thread, which is about the loss of preterite: which is alive and well, as has been established already.


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## Darkicity

So if I were to use the passe simple in spoken French would people in France think I am odd?


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## Hulalessar

Darkicity said:


> So if I were to use the passe simple in spoken French would people in France think I am odd?



Very possibly. I have never heard it used in speech.


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## Nino83

In Sicily, young speakers (like me) use always the past simple (also for recent actions) when speaking in Sicilian but the present perfect when speaking in Italian, except for historic facts.
_Sta matina annai o' bar. Aieri annai o' pub. L'annu scossu annai a Roma. Quannu Napuliuni *vinciu/piddiu* 'a guerra_.
_Stamattina sono andato al bar. Ieri sono andato al pub. L'anno scorso sono andato a Roma. Quando Napoleone *vinse/perse* la guerra._
Note that the past simple is more regular in Sicilian (like it is in Spanish or in Portuguese) than in Italian.
_(Iddu) vinciu, piddiu, vidiu, liggiu, biviu, cuciu, _vs. _(egli)_ _vinse, perse, vide, lesse, bevve, cosse_ and so on.


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## Scholiast

Greetings!



Meyer Wolfsheim said:


> I see no waning of the preterite in Modern English



One little example (also of a slight difference between BrE and Ame): "I've finished my homework/arrived/bought a car/had a coffee" is BrE, Americans will tend to use the simple preterite ("I finished my homework [&c.]"). Here as elsewhere, the AmE usage is more conservative than BrE.

Σ


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## olaszinho

I am from Central Italy and I normally use both tenses (Present Perfect and Simple Past). The same occurs in Tuscany, Florence, where the usage of  passato remoto is quite widespread even for recent events. It's quite normal to hear sentences like these:_ una settima fa andai a Roma_: I went to Rome a week ago or _lessi quel libro 3 mesi fa_ / I read that book three months ago. So, the simple past is still used in Spoken Italian, unlike French, particularly below the line La Spezia - Rimini (Centre and South of Italy). I was reading a few Fairytales in Catalan a few days ago and I was really surprised by the fact that in this language they use a periphrastic perfect even to tell Fairytales: un _una vegada el rei va veure un nen bonic_/ _Once upon a time the king saw a nice child_. In Italian the only acceptable verb tense is the passato remoto:_ una volta il re vide un bel bambino._


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## Nino83

olaszinho said:


> So, the simple past is still used in Spoken Italian, unlike French, particularly below the line La Spezia - Rimini (Centre and South of Italy).


 
The difference is in which contexts it is used. In Tuscany and in some other regions it's used also for recent events, in other regions only for distant events.


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## jmx

olaszinho said:


> I was reading a few Fairytales in Catalan a few days ago and I was really surprised by the fact that in this language they use a periphrastic perfect even to tell Fairytales: un _una vegada el rei va veure un nen bonic_/ _Once upon a time the king saw a nice child_. In Italian the only acceptable verb tense is the passato remoto:_ una volta il re vide un bel bambino._


The tense you mention for Catalan, periphrastic past "va veure", is equivalent to "he saw", while the perfect "ha vist" is equivalent to "he has seen".


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## olaszinho

jmx said:


> The tense you mention for Catalan, periphrastic past "va veure", is equivalent to "he saw", while the perfect "ha vist" is equivalent to "he has seen".



Yes, I know..... but Catalan also has a Simple Perfect, called _Prerèrit perfet_ and I thought it was used in formal writing: fairytales, essays and novels, but I often come across the _perifrastic perfèt_ in writing as well. My Catalan textbooks say that the Simple perfect should be used along with the periphrastic perfect in newspapers, magazines and books, but probably the reality is quite different. For instance, as far as I know, the _Pretèrit perfet_ is more used in Balearic and Valencian, isn't it?


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## jmx

olaszinho said:


> ... as far as I know, the _Pretèrit perfet_ is more used in Balearic and Valencian, isn't it?


Yes, and probably not in all of Valencia. In Catalonia, most native speakers wouldn't be able to find the right conjugation of any verb in _Pretèrit perfet_, or at least the irregular ones, even if their lives were at stake. That's for adults, now imagine with the children who read fairy tales.


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## gburtonio

I find two things slightly strange about 'passato remoto' in Italian. Firstly, not everyone knows all the forms of 'passato remoto' – certainly the majority seem to know the most common verbs, such as 'andare' – 'andai' and so on, but, at least in the north of Italy, many people would have quite large gaps in their knowledge of the forms. It's something you have to learn at school, after all, since the tense is not used in spoken language (again I'm just talking about the north here). So if someone says '50 anni fa …' (50 years ago …), and then realises that they don't know the 'passato remoto' of the verb they want to use, they either have to rephrase or just use 'passato prossimo', which is considered 'wrong' in this context.

The thing that seems strange to me is how ubiquitous 'passato remoto' is in literature. It just surprises me that there doesn't ever seem to have been a movement to abandon the learned, 'passato remoto', and use the more colloquial, popular 'passato prossimo'.

I wonder if Italian speakers feel that the situation is in flux. Is 'passato remoto' sustainable – given that you actually have to study it at school in order to know or the forms – or could it disappear entirely?


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## Penyafort

olaszinho said:


> but Catalan also has a Simple Perfect, called _Prerèrit perfet_ and I thought it was used in formal writing: fairytales, essays and novels, but I often come across the _perifrastic perfèt_ in writing as well. My Catalan textbooks say that the Simple perfect should be used along with the periphrastic perfect in newspapers, magazines and books, but probably the reality is quite different.



Newspapers and magazines tend to use a non-literary standard register. The Simple Perfect is still very alive but mainly in literature, formal books, traditional songs, historical references and the like. And almost exclusively in the third person. As Jmx said, most natives don't even know the less common irregular forms of the Simple Perfect and would have to look them up somewhere. So even if different, the usage would be similar to the Italian/French one rather than to the Portuguese/Spanish one.


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## olaszinho

gburtonio said:


> I find two things slightly strange about 'passato remoto' in Italian. Firstly, not everyone knows all the forms of 'passato remoto' – certainly the majority seem to know the most common verbs, such as 'andare' – 'andai' and so on, but, at least in the north of Italy, many people would have quite large gaps in their knowledge of the forms.



Not only do we have to  learn "Passato Remoto" at school, but also all fairy tales and short stories are written and told by using this tense, so even in the North of Italy children can learn Passato Remoto easily. I'd like to recall that in Bologna (Northern Italy), for instance, passato remoto is still used in speech too. In addition to this, all Primary School books include various forms of Passato remoto, so this tense is something familiar to kids as well. Since the most common verbs have irregular forms in Italian Simple past, all educated Italians should  know it, they can find the most common forms in every book, essay and even in articles and messages on the Internet, apart from school textbooks.  Finally, Passato remoto is normally used in the news, conferences, debates and sports commentaries.



Penyafort said:


> So even if different, the usage would be similar to the Italian/French one rather than to the Portuguese/Spanish one



As I said in a previous post, the usage may be similar to that of Northern Italian/French. Anyway, as far as I know  French_ passé simple_ has not been used for centuries in the spoken language, this is not the case with Italian. Furthermore,  in Tuscany, Centre of Italy and  most Southern regions,  "passato remoto" is still alive in speech as well. Italy is not only Lombardy, Venetia and Piedmont after all... 

In my opinion, the usage of  "Passato remoto" in Italy is very similar to the German "Praeteritum" rather than the French Simple past, except modal verbs of course.​


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## Nino83

gburtonio said:


> I wonder if Italian speakers feel that the situation is in flux. Is 'passato remoto' sustainable – given that you actually have to study it at school in order to know or the forms – or could it disappear entirely?


As Olaszinho said, we learn _passato remoto_ by listening other people speak, it is used. 
Yes, some verbs can be difficult because they are not used. For example, the verb _cuocere_ (to cook/bake) is not used in _passato remoto_, so many people don't know the exact past form, _cuocqui, cossi, cuocei_?  
But it's due to the fact that some verbs are not used with this tense, it's a matter of verbs, not a matter of tenses.


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## Angelo di fuoco

SerinusCanaria3075 said:


> Without a doubt, the singular and plural forms can be easily distinguished in French, but notice how the 2nd person in Italian might cause confussion when learning it:
> Parlare: parlai, parl*asti*, parlò, parlammo, parl*aste*, parlarono



Spanish: hablaste(s), hablasteis. The 2nd person singular form is found only in colloquial speech, and I think it's rather ugly. However, until now I heard it only from Latin Americans, where the 2nd person plural has been replaced, morphologically, with the 3rd person plural forms & Ustedes.
I attribute this extra -s to the fact that (almost) all the other tenses have 2nd person singular endings with -s.

It Italian, the problem is rather the morphological identity of the 2nd person plural passato remoto and imperfetto del congiuntivo: voi parlaste / se voi parlaste. 



olaszinho said:


> Not only do we have to  learn "Passato Remoto" at school, but also all fairy tales and short stories are written and told by using this tense, so even in the North of Italy children can learn Passato Remoto easily. I'd like to recall that in Bologna (Northern Italy), for instance, passato remoto is still used in speech too. In addition to this, all Primary School books include various forms of Passato remoto, so this tense is something familiar to kids as well. Since the most common verbs have irregular forms in Italian Simple past, all educated Italians should  know it, they can find the most common forms in every book, essay and even in articles and messages on the Internet, apart from school textbooks.  Finally, Passato remoto is normally used in the news, conferences, debates and sports commentaries.



Sports commentaries? Wow!



olaszinho said:


> As I said in a previous post, the usage may be similar to that of Northern Italian/French. Anyway, as far as I know  French_ passé simple_ has not been used for centuries in the spoken language, this is not the case with Italian. Furthermore,  in Tuscany, Centre of Italy and  most Southern regions,  "passato remoto" is still alive in speech as well. Italy is not only Lombardy, Venetia and Piedmont after all...



As for all I recall, the passé simple is used in prose dialogues in the musketeer novels by Dumas (in a very natural way roughly in the same way as in contemporary Castilian Spanish) and Hugo (e. g. it is used extensively in the scene between Claude Frollo and Esmeralda in _The Hunchback of Notre-Dame_). The passé simple also occurs sometimes in dialogue in _Les Misérables_.
Unfortunately, I cannot tell about its use in novels by Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert or Proust, or Dumas novels with contemporary settings like _Le Comte de Monte-Christo_.



olaszinho said:


> In my opinion, the usage of  "Passato remoto" in Italy is very similar to the German "Praeteritum" rather than the French Simple past, except modal verbs of course.



The use of the German Präteritum is a very complicated thing, since it's quite inconsistent even within a region and within the language of single speakers. It would be overly complicating a discussion about the use of the simple past in French and Italian.


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## francisgranada

Well, in Northern Italy, especially in some regions like Piedmont, the passato remoto is practically not used. However, when I read whatever Italian article (or written text) about the history, someone's biography or - in general -  about "things" that happened in the past, the passato remoto is normally used. This is valid also for Wikipedia, e.g. in the article entitled Piemonte: _"Abitato fin dall'età neolitica ... *fu* occupato dalle popolazioni celtiche ... che *fondarono* colonie come Augusta Taurinorum (l'odierna Torino) ... "_

This is perfectly ok,  even more in this _historical_ context il passato remoto sounds much better than the the passato prossimo,  at least to me (a non native Italian).  At the same time I'm used to say (and write) e.g. _ieri sono andato, sono nato nel 1896_ instead of the  "grammatically correct" (strictly speaking)_ ieri andai, nacqui nel 1896, _etc ...

Now, my questions are:
- Do the articles/texts using the passato remoto sound bookish/unusual/artificial ... to e.g. a native Piedmotese?
- If a native Piedmontese had to _tell_ (not to _write_) the story of Piedmont, would he say _"Abitato fin dall'età neolitica è stato occupato dalle popolazioni celtiche che hanno fondato colonie come Augusta Taurinorum (l'odierna Torino) ..."_?
- If a native Piedmontese had to _write _an article about the story of Piedmont (e.g. in Wikipedia or elsewhere) , would he prefer to use the passato prossimo or he would "automatically" use passato remoto?


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## J.F. de TROYES

Darkicity said:


> So if I were to use the passe simple in spoken French would people in France think I am odd?



Yes, definitively.

I think there is another way than its irregular forms to explain why _the passé simple_ has been wiped out in spoken French and confined to written narratives and storytelling. A speaker shares the same present time as the person or the audience he is adressing. This current time is the reference-time  for locating the past events he is telling. Due to its morphology ( a present tense auxiliary and a past participle ) and its aspectual value ( uncompleted ), the _passé composé_ links the story's time and the time when the story is being told. Instead, using the _passé simple_ cuts off the narrator's past from the current time. The _passé composé_ is correlated with the current time ; the passé simple is'nt : that's why the first is considerd _the discourse tense and _the second_ the narrative tense. _Using the p.c. in written instead of the commonplace p.s. results in a stylistic effect. The writer A.Camus is famous for having used it in his novel _L'étranger_ ; the same effect is being cleared up by another text, the poem _Déjeuner du matin_ by J. Prevert ( here with its translation ) where the narrator is a woman that has been left by her lover and remembers the last breakfast  they had together. She's keeping in mind what happened at that time, as if everything were still alive. Because of the p.c. we don't read an account, but we hear a voice telling something deeply connected with this woman's current situation.

That given, it doesn't explain why the p.s. has verbally disappeared in spoken French and the préterito perfecto ( present perfect ) in Latino-American Spanish ( at least, in some countries ) , while it is less and less used in German, Italian and Romanian ( except in the Olteny region ). Maybe it is partly due to influences of other  languages spoken in the same area or around.


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## Olaszinhok

J.F. de TROYES said:


> That given, it doesn't explain why the p.s. has verbally disappeared in spoken French and the préterito perfecto ( present perfect ) in Latino-American Spanish ( at least, in some countries ) , while it is less and less used in German, Italian and Romanian ( except in the Olteny region ). Maybe it is partly due to influences of other languages spoken in the same area or around.



The _passé simple_ is still used in newspapers (unlike the imperfect of the subjunctive), not only in essays and novels; whenever I read a French paper or magazine I easily encounter a few forms of _passé simple. _In some Italian regions the "passato remoto" is particularly alive, like in Tuscany, Apulia or Campania, the region of Neaples. As for Romanian, in the Olteny region, the usage of the simple past is completely different from the standard Language. It is used for very recent events and actions, within the past 24 hours. In contemporary Romanian the simple past is rarely used even in literature, it is a sort of dying tense, far less common than in French.


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## danielstan

About Romanian spoken in Oltenia region (Oltenia - Wikipedia) I beg to differ, as native speaker of the dialect spoken in Bucharest (Wallachian dialect):
Oltenians do use the _passé simple_ in most situations (the same situations where standard Romanian uses the _passé composé_) and there is no subtle nuance in their usage.
The preference of _passé simple_  in Oltenian dialect is the only major difference to standard Romanian, otherwise one cannot distinguish an Oltenian speaker from a Bucharest speaker.
We, the rest of Romanians, make jokes about Oltenians by using the simple past in a pejorative manner...

In Aromanian the _passé simple_ is used more often than the _passé composé_: Limba aromână - Wikipedia


I have not had the chance to read about the historical development of Romanian spoken in Oltenia (probably because the dialectal differences from standard are very few).
I would mention Oltenia region was the most Latinised (Romanised) province of Dacia:
the Romans conquered this province first and maintained some presence in fortresses located on the Northern shore of Danube hundreds of years after they officially abandoned Dacia.

Oldest surviving document in Romanian ('Neacsu's letter' - 1521 AD) written in Wallachian dialect uses everywhere the _passé composé_.
Other Romanian religious texts printed in Romanian in XVI century (in South Transylvanian dialect) also prefer the _passé composé_.

With these historical data we cannot have a definitive answer on Romanian evolution.

But the linguistic fact that _passé composé_ is preferred in Romanian and _passé simple_ is on the verge of extinction indicates this linguistic phenomenon was present in Vulgar Latin before the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476 AD)
and spread all over Romanised world at that time.


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## J.F. de TROYES

Olaszinhok said:


> The _passé simple_ is still used in newspapers (unlike the imperfect of the subjunctive), not only in essays and novels; whenever I read a French paper or magazine I easily encounter a few forms of _passé simple. _



 Right . The _passé simple_ is  used if a narrative is inserted in an article , but not in a dialog. The point is that this tense has disappeared from spoken French.



danielstan said:


> But the linguistic fact that _passé composé_ is preferred in Romanian and _passé simple_ is on the verge of extinction indicates this linguistic phenomenon was present in Vulgar Latin before the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476 AD)
> and spread all over Romanised world at that time.



Thanks for all your information. Do you mean that the _passé simple _is no longer in use in any kind of text ?


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