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How does one do past tense?


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Hey Scum Baggio

I have caught you out.

The English word for Zeppellin is Derigable.

Not to be confused with Led Zeppellin which there is no translation for. Except damned fine music.

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Lamock Ch.,

noo6 gives two different examples, one with "see" and another with "go".

"Muea-wan-nee" is the same as "muea-wan", but in this case this one extra syllable sounds better in the sentence.

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Originally posted by kratai:

"Hey Scum Baggio

I have caught you out.

The English word for Zeppellin is Derigable."

And I bet my broken old toilet seat that this is a word imported from the French! It certainly looks like it (don't confuse with English adjectives that end in -able; this is a noun).

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Scum_Baggio wrote:

quote:

"Muea-wan-nee" is the same as "muea-wan", but in this case this one extra syllable sounds better in the sentence.

OK. I'll buy that. I'd heard of it but hadn't really run across a hard and fast example of it occurring (I'm new to this language). But my question is, would a Thai understand you either way? Or would they just look at you from Mars if you dropped the 'nee' (like they usually do me even when I get my pronunciation right)?

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sorry it is a bit confusing the

way I wrote that.

 

muea wan phom hen khun laew

would be:

"yesterday I saw you"

the original question was for

"I saw you yesterday"

phom hen khun muea wan nee

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Originally posted by Lamock Chokaprret:

"But my question is, would a Thai understand you either way?" (muea-wan/muea-wan-nee)

Absolutely; but maybe the version with the "-nee" sounds a little bit more sophisticated (to my ears it does). See also "maruen"(day after tomorrow) and "maruen-nee".

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Thai has no system of tenses (like Indoeuropean languages), but does have aspect (like Chinese). Laew is an aspect marker: "noon laew" (said by the tired owner of a guesthouse to his customers at 3 am) can mean "I want to sleep now" (future)(so please close the light), "pai laew" usually means "he's gone" (past). Laew expresses a change of state.

Slavonic languages like Russian have both (perfective and imperfective verbs).

The English "continuous form" may be interpreted as aspect, and German has some pairs of verbs (trinken - austrinken) similar to Russian.

Thai and many other Asian languages are more context-dependent than Indoeuropean languages.

There is much less redundancy, they can be very terse and succinct (classical Chinese).

Almost everything that is understood con be omitted (especially pronouns: Pro-drop language like romance languages).

It is not possible to translate an English sentence into Thai without knowing the context. And a Thai sentence can have many English meanings depending on the context.

BTW (Grammatical)tense in Indoeuropean languages is not always the same as (real) time: spoken German uses present tense for future events. Future tense exists, but is used to express probability. Present perfect is used to express past events (like in French and Italian).

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  • 1 month later...

gorn (low sound) = before

tee laow (high) = at already

Both indicate past tense.

But, if you say

meur wun

or

meur wun nee (yesterday) tense doesn't come into it.

eg

meur wun chai mai. loog sao chun wing oorg bai tannon.

yesterday, yes? (means understand) daughter mine run out go street.

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