Thrissel wrote:A Sheonaidh, cha chanainn sa Bheurla "I am working in a factory", ach nam bithinn a' ciallachadh "I work in a factory" cha chanainn "I'll work in a factory" cuideachd, agus 's e sin as coireach a tha mi a' faighneachd. Tha diofair eadar "Does your son go to school yet?" agus "Will your son go to school yet?", tha "I'll drink fernet &c" a' coimhead mar a dh'fhuasgail mi sin a thòiseachadh a dhèanamh, amsaa.
*shrug*
Well I personally say "I'm working in..." or "I'm working for..." when I talk about the company I work for or the location of my office. What I
do say is "I work in IT". Effectively, my place of work is temporary, but my career is not.
"Tha mi ag obair ann an buidhean coimpiutaireachd."
ach
"´S e neach-chompiutair a th' annam."
This is just like talking about where you're from:
"Tha mi a' fuireach ann an Alba."
vs
"´S e Albannach a th' annam."
There's a difference between each pair of "is doing" "does" and "will do" in English, but Gaelic really only has two here.
The problem here is that everybody calls the Gaelic tense the "future" which we think of as the English "will".
Well no, actually. Most of the English future is "going to" -- "I'm going to go on holiday to the islands next year" "I'm going to study more Gaelic tomorrow" "I'm going to stop giving examples after this last one".
"Will" is a peculiar thing in English and isn't really the future at all.
The Gaelic future is something different again, and I'll have to give a bit of a boring linguistics lecture to explain it properly.
Classically (and in academia), what is now called a verb "tense" was described in terms of "tense and aspect". Tense just means "time", and aspect's a bit hard to explain, so I'll just demonstrate
"past perfect" -- tense=past, aspect=perfect
"present progressive" -- tense=present, aspect=progressive
Now there's an aspect that has dropped out of favour recently, but occurs in older grammars: aorist. Aorist is a Greek word meaning "without horizons". Alexander Stewart's
Elements of Gaelic Grammar refers briefly to the Gaelic future as "Aorist of Future". He also presents the English "will" as aorist.
Think about it: "I will be here" vs "I'm going to be here". The first one should feel more unconditional, less restricted, but in the second, you would expect to be told
when.
Now in English we have a distinction between present and future aorist: "I do" and "I will", but in Gaelic, these two are reduced to one, which is referred to as the future simply because traditional grammarians lacked imagination and chose to label everything based on Latin.
Do we need present and future aorists? Some churches use "I do" and some use "I will" for wedding vows -- they are functionally almost identical. And "I will always be here" does effectively say "I am always here" -- the different implications of the different forms are a bonus, but not strictly needed.
OK, winding it back.
The Gaelic present tense has a "progressive" ("doing") aspect. That is an aspect that has horizons, that has limits. I'm not going to be in my job forever, so it has to have horizons -- that's why in both English and Gaelic I saying "I am working in the outskirts of Edinburgh at the moment".
On the other hand, I like cycling, and even if I was to move job, move house etc etc etc I still wouldn't take the bus very often. It's not a situation that I really expect to change, so I want this aorist -- this unlimited aspect -- in what I say.
So maybe it was unclear of me to talk about present vs habitual. Perhaps I should have talked about "current status" vs "limitless normal state" or something like that.
The only minor complication (and really, it is only minor!) is trying to accept that from someone else's opinion of the difference between a limited and an unlimited state may differ from yours. When you're learning someone else's language, you have to learn their point of view -- you have to speak to and from their point of view.
It is for this reason that I say Gaelic will never be
my language -- I can never impose my point of view, and must always defer to someone else's.
)
to disillusion you 3sel, but were you to say "He said he doesn't like it" instead of "He said he didn't like it" I doubt if many native English speakers would bat an eyelid. Mind, there can be subtle differences between "He said he didn't like it", "He said he doesn't like it", "He says he didn't like it" and "He says he doesn't like it", m.e. You surely don't expect all native English speakers to be consistent?