| Lesson 7 | |
|---|---|
| Tweet Topic Started: Nov 30 2009, 05:07 PM (283 Views) | |
| pirmas | Nov 30 2009, 05:07 PM Post #1 |
|
Administrator
|
Prussian Lesson 7 Imperfect Past Tense lábdien klasá! ká bást ju? kát háso ju liestæ nedælás nogál gemachan? This lesson we are going to finish working on conjugation for a while with the imperfect or literary past. Imperfect past is used mostly in the north and in the Kiev and Chernigov urban centers. This is because imperfect past is "faster" than perfect past. In literature (both fiction and non-fiction) imperfect past is used to give a sense of action, lacking the helping verb means characters are acting as compared to constantly being broken from their actions. The sentence structure remains fluid, though the preferred is SVO. Here is the conjugation table: Your best source of examples comes from Sviendorog's poem, which I will repost here:
The hardest part for you now should be vocabulary, so let us break it down a bit, shall we?
The first word to stand out might be bráuláfáth: βράyλάфάθ -'áfáth is the feminine imperfect past conjugation meaning the verb is bráulæt. In this case the extra ' is ignored, but from a novice's perspective another good guess would be braulæt or even braulát. Bráulæt means "to go", in the imperfect past "went". Ien and een are both "a" or "one". Ien is neuter and een is feminine. Dien is "day" so that means thus far we have "A/One day went a/one". Dalish is an adjective and means "beautiful" so thus far: "A/One day went a/one beautiful". Mietena means "girl" so that means: "A/One day went a/one beautiful girl". From here we can stop and correct the ien/een to: "One day went a beautiful girl". This is not actually an issue, as in essence it means the same thing no matter if you pick "a" or "one". Lastly is "wis se wolgá". Se is an article, it means "the". Wolgá is obvious to its meaning, it is the Volga River. Wis is a locative and roughly translates to "up to" or more properly "up to the edge of". Anglo-Baltic is very fond of locatives, so it might be confusing for a while. But for now, "wis" means "up to". So this sentence boils down to "One day went a beautiful girl up to the Volga" or in a more proper English: "One day a beautiful girl went to the Volga".
For those paying attention, you will notice that two imperfect conjugations appear here and one is feminine and the other neuter. The first is kræsáláfáth, and breaking it down we find that it is "kræsálæt" in its infinitive form. This means "to see" so in the imperfect past it is "saw". The second, sedáfást, is "sedæt" in the infinitive and means "to sit". Tór is another locative meaning "there" or more specifically, "in the previously defined location". Win (also spelled vin due to the Prussian merger of w and v) is the pronoun "she". Ien is the same as above. Vienæ means "lonely". Wulf translates as expected into "wolf". So far the sentence reads: "There saw she a/one lonely wolf sat". Some will notice that the wolf's action is also in imperfect past. In English "sat" would be "sitting", but in Anglo-Baltic it is in the imperfect past to maintain the tense within the sentence. The phrace "ám se upa" means "by the riverbank". Ám is another locative meaning "within the vicinity of". So finishing the sentence and making it more readable: "There she saw a lonely wolf sitting on the banks". Notice the use of "on" verses "by", this is mostly semantics. The Anglo-Baltic word for "on" is "on" and means "supported from under by". This is all for now. If you have questions feel free to ask. Edited by pirmas, Nov 30 2009, 09:36 PM.
|
![]() |
|
| 1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous) | |
| « Previous Topic · klasá · Next Topic » |






1:57 PM Jul 11