Chlouvānem/Syntax: Difference between revisions

The perfect “tense” here does not focus on the action, but on its result. The girl has finished painting her face, and it may be seen that her face is still painted - when she did it is still irrelevant, but it happened sufficiently close in time that the result of that action may still be seen.

The Chlouvānem perfect, however, has a broader use than the English one, compare:

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Perfect "tense" with second inferential, again, as before, its interpretation is highly dependent on the context the sentence is found in. For example, there are face painting colours out of place, but it’s unlikely she did paint her face - e.g. it may not be a logical time to do it, or too little colour seems to have been used.

The Chlouvānem perfect is however also used where English would use ''past perfect'' or ''future perfect'', as the “impact on the present” is understood to be on the time the main action in the sentence takes place, thus something that happened earlier is considered to have an impact on it:

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Still, note that out of context both pluperfect and future perfect may be expressed analytically, by using the perfective subjunctive plus ''lā'' (with) and the past or future tense of ''jalle'' (to be).

A notable exception to this use is with so-called “chained actions”, when the second one is a direct consequence of the first and the first one is usually still ongoing; the second one is therefore only a momentane happening inside the broader context of the first, and thus the choice between present and past is once again dependent on the impact on the present. Note that in such cases the two verbs are usually connected with ''no'' instead of ''sama''. Compare:

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This sentence may be rephrased as "Hāliehulca opened the window, then closed it twelve ''railai'' later", in Chl.: ''hālyehulca prāgdeiru vuldate : tū māmei railų nin spṛšekte/aspṛšate''. Note that in the latter verb, in this case, both the past and the perfect may be used freely; in colloquial style this is also possible for the first verb (e.g. ''hālyehulca prāgdeiru uldekte ...''), but this is considered a mistake in more formal contexts, c.f. the alternative translation "Hālyehulca, who had opened the window, ..."

In narrative, it is common to use the perfect for a completed action and the (aspectless) past for an action that begins immediately after (examples taken from the excerpt "[[Chlouvānem#A_festive_day|A festive day]]", among the example texts on the main Chlouvānem page):

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