Re: time distinctions

On Wed, 23 Aug 2000, H. S. Teoh wrote:

> I don't think Mandarin has a way of differentiating between past and
> perfect tenses. Of course, you do have various ways of talking about the
> past, each with its own nuances, so arguably you can express the idea of a
> perfect tense in Mandarin. But a Mandarin speaker certainly doesn't think
> in terms of whether an action is past or perfect.
The perfect marker in Mandarin is "-le" (not the same as the sentence
marker "le" at the end of sentences).

--
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
"[O]n the whole I'd rather make love than shoot guns [...]"
        --Eric Raymond