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Ask-A-Linguist - Message details
Subject: British English & Spanish Spanish vs. American English & Mexican Spanish
Question:
Hello,

I am very curious about a language construct I observed when studying Spanish in Spain. I noticed similarities between the grammatical constructs of British English and Spanish Spanish and similarities between American English and Mexican Spanish. I am an American with a British father, and I lived near the Mexican border for quite some time before going to Spain, so I have experience listening to both kinds of English and Spanish.

Here is an example of the similarities I've noticed. In England and in Spain, if you are talking about something in the recent past, the form used is as follows:

I've gone to the park today.
He ido al parque hoy.

In Mexican Spanish and American English we would generally say:

I went to the park today
Fui al parque hoy.

Any knowledge about why these grammatical similarities exist across shared geography but different languages? I find it fascinating.

Thanks!

Reply:
This is indeed an interesting phenomenon, maybe more than you realize. German also has, like English and Spanish, a "preterite", i.e. a "simple" inflected past tense form and not phrasal. In your example,

Ich ging heute nach dem / im Parke.
I went today to the / into:the Park.

versus

Ich bin heute nach dem / im Parke gegangen.
I am ("have") today .......

But the German usual translation for 'I went to the park today.' is the phrasal form, the "perfektum", the "present perfect" and not the simple inflected past. That is, German, closely related to and with a similar verb system to English, uses the compound phrasal form as a simple past, with no relation to the present. So it's like Peninsular Spanish, and like French by the way, and Insular English is becoming, and not like Continental English and Mexican Spanish. (Although our panelist Jim Fiedelholz knows a lot about Mexican Spanish and he can perhaps help here.)

In English, we can of course say

'I have gone to the park today.'

but one gets the sense that there is an adverb such as "already" that has been left out and there is an implication that the speaker normally goes to the park but later and that they have already done it today, earlier than usual.

The German inflected past, ging in this instance, normally corresponds to the Spanish (and French) imperfect simple inflected past

Spanish iba
French allais

where the sense is repetitive or iterative. That is, German has adopted the imperfective, iterative, incompletive aspect form similar to French for its inflected past, a very unGermanic use. So I suspect that Dr. Pyatt is at least partly correct in that we are dealing with an areal, or Sprachbund phenomenon here in British English and European Germanic. I don't know what's going on with this in Dannorwedish -- I believe Modern Dutch works similarly with German but am not certain.

American English is of course rather resistant, or let us say, not very exposed to these European subtle phenomena, and our simple inflected past has remained more like the Spanish preterito and the traditional Germanic inflected past.

While areal phenomena, i.e. loan translation among languages in contact, will go a long way toward explaining the difference between British and American English here -- especially when we consider French with which British English has more contact than with Peninsular Spanish, it does not explain why the shift should have occurred to begin with. My short answer is that I don't know. But where I would begin to look is things envolving at least the following:

a. the narrowing of the simple inflected past, especially in French, to a historical narrative reporting. So French je fui... is virtually absent from Modern Spoken and ordinary "chatty" written French and that's been going on for quite some time.

b. the fact that while Romance languages inherited from Latin two inflected simple pasts, an imperfect and a preterite, or perfect, completive (or simply aspectually unspecified), Germanic had only one. (Scots English still has "gang". English generally replaced the Germanic past of 'go' with a suppletive form, the infected past of the verb wend. In my native dialect, where wend is still in use, the form went is actually diverbal; it can be the suppletive past of go or the ordinary regular past of wend (cf .

c. the fact that the phrase perfect {have/be + past participle} in all Germanic and Romance has a completive sense.

So I suggest this completive sense has gotten extended in French, German, Dutch, and now is getting extended in Insular English at the expense of the simple past, and in the case of French, replacing the simple past, now relegated to reporting narrative of events in the often distant past not connected to the status of the subject's state in the present.

Any panelists know what's happening in Peninsular and Continental Portuguese?

In Rumanian a similar thing has happened as in French. The imperfect inflected past is rampant:

mergi 'I went over and over, used to go'

(from the verb merge 'go', cognate with French marcher and in most areas, the completive form is phrasal, with (have + past participle), thus

Am mergi. 'I went, lit. 'I have gone...'.

the simple inflected preterite as in French relegated to literary, historical, or legal writing and narrative. However, in Oltenia the simple preterite is the normal form alongside the inflected imperfect, thus in Oltenia instead of am mergi for 'I went', one would have

Meri (also can hear Mersi )

which is essentially the past participle stem with the Latin perfective and pluperfect suffixes.


U of Cincinnati
Dept of Anthropology

Reply From: Joseph F Foster    click here to access email
Date: Aug-14-2009
Other Replies:
  1. Re: British English & Spanish Spanish vs. American English & Mexican Spanish Anthea Fraser Gupta    (Aug-15-2009)
  2. Re: British English & Spanish Spanish vs. American English & Mexican Spanish Elizabeth J Pyatt    (Aug-14-2009)
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