Roger Mills wrote:
> Max #1 wrote:
>
>>René Uittenbogaard wrote:
>>
>>
>>>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!
>>>
>
> What form are "had" and "was"? Subjunctives? (or whatever it's called in
> Dutch).
They are definitely not subjunctives (those would have been "ware" and
(apparently) "hadde" (although I never came across that last form before
I looked it up)).
Instead, they are identical to the past tense singular forms of the
indicative (where 1st, 2nd and 3rd person are identical).
> As the Engl. translation suggests, these are more like
> contrary-to-fact or optative sentences, IMO.
Exactly.
----
Ray Brown wrote:
> o, no - these are not _past_ imperatives - which doesn't make sense
> (see below) - they are _perfect_ imperatives, i.e. imperatives in the
> perfect aspect.
I didn't identify them correctly right away - sorry :-/
> What we have, it seems to me, is the use of imperatives of 'to have'
> to 'to be' + perfect participle in expressing a desire or wish that
> things had been different in the past. Dutch uses the imperative
> mood, ancient Greek used a past tense of the indicative mood & Latin
> a past tense of the subjunctive mood.
Cool! Thanks for pointing this out :)
René