Re: past tense imperative
From: | Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> |
Date: | Friday, April 15, 2005, 13:47 |
Hi!
René Uittenbogaard <ruittenb@...> writes:
> A couple of days ago, I was struck by an interesting grammatical construction
> in Dutch. Dutch has a construction in which an imperative can be used in
> the past perfect:
>
> Had dat dan gezegd! - You should have told me so!
> Was dan niet gegaan! - You shouldn't have gone!
Cool! German cannot do that, that's for sure! Very concise -- I
think I'll have to keep that it mind for conlanging.
It's a bit strange, of course, since the action contained it the
command is obviously already terminated, so 'imperative' is a strange
word here.
> AFAIK, in other languages, the imperative always seems to be used
> with the present tense.
>
> Are there other languages in which this phenomenon is known?
No idea.
**Henrik
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