Re: past tense imperative

Henrik Theiling wrote:
> Hi!
> Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> writes:
>
>>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.
Yep - I think that semantically, you cannot rightfully use the
imperative in the past tense, as you said. The imperative is probably
used here because Dutch lacks some other mood with which to express
unfulfillable obligation.

> Thinking again, I'd probably include an imperative in some irrealis mood
> in past perfect in a conlang.
Is that possible? The imperative is a mood by itself, right? Can the
imperative be used together with another mood?

In Calénnawn, moods are under construction; the "regular" (i.e.
systematic and boring) way Calénnawn will handle this is to introduce a
dedicated mood (and probably add a pronoun; but Calénnawn is pro-drop
anyway).

> Thus in German, I'd approximate that
> with 'Konjunktiv' ('subjunctive' in English?):
>
>    *Hätt' das dann auch gesagt!
>    *Wär dann halt nicht gegangen!
>
> Of course, these are ungrammatical, but nice for a conlang, as I said.
They sound quite well to my untrained-in-German ears.
I may even be tempted to use these :)


----
Max wrote:

 > Toi! Ai travaillé quand je serai revenu! = You! I want you to have
 > worked when I'll be back

This makes *lots* of sense! This is rightful use of the perfective
imperative. The Dutch example BTW was also perfective, but Dutch cannot
use this construction.

Interesting to see that the verb form for the second person is "ai"
here, and not "as" (as in: "tu as") like I'd expect.


----
Another thought crossed my mind: are perfective verbs in Russian ever
used in the imperative? What do they mean? Examples?



René

Replies