The English Past Perfect in Bulgarian

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Pottig
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The English Past Perfect in Bulgarian

Postby Pottig » Sun Jan 06, 2019 7:21 pm

Hi all. I am currently teaching English to a Bulgarian speaker as part of my TEFL course. For one of my assignments, I have to analyse a piece of her written work and note common errors that she makes. To do this, it helps to take into account the student's native language as the error can be rooted in a grammatical/lexical pattern that they are (mistakenly) copying in their English.

In her written piece, about her summer holiday last year, she has a tendency to use the English past perfect tense when the past simple would suffice. For instance, she formulates sentences like we had seen the beautiful mountians and the deep see and in the weekend we'd went for a short tour around the coutry. These two sentences read better to my native ears as we saw the beautiful mountains and in the weekend we went for a short tour around the coutry.

My question: is there some grammatical reason why a Bulgarian native speaker would favour the English past perfect over the past simple when the latter is easier to formulate and makes more sense in the above examples? I can't find anything about this online so any help is appreciated. Thanks!
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Re: The English Past Perfect in Bulgarian

Postby reineke » Sun Jan 06, 2019 9:03 pm

Did the pupil start the sentence with we had seen...and was there a previous action in play in those sentences? The pupil may see past perfect as a safer choice for completed actions in a more distant past.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluperfect

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_verbs
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Re: The English Past Perfect in Bulgarian

Postby Speakeasy » Sun Jan 06, 2019 10:24 pm

CompImp wrote: 'in' the weekend wouldn't be correct English, either...
CompImp wrote:Language was a thing, then grammarians wrote books about it, and now some people try to force others to let the tail wag the dog. Weird.
Yep, whole lotta’ consistency goin’ on here!
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Re: The English Past Perfect in Bulgarian

Postby reineke » Sun Jan 06, 2019 10:26 pm

"I am a native English speaker and teacher living in New Zealand and I do say 'in the weekend' and I've checked over the last few days and many of my friends do as well so I think it is quite common in New Zealand. A teacher I work with who is British questioned me over my use of it in a past tense exercise I had created for my ESL learners which is what prompted me to go and ask other people :)"

https://forum.wordreference.com/threads ... end.62308/
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Re: The English Past Perfect in Bulgarian

Postby David1917 » Sun Jan 06, 2019 10:47 pm

Pottig wrote:My question: is there some grammatical reason why a Bulgarian native speaker would favour the English past perfect over the past simple when the latter is easier to formulate and makes more sense in the above examples? I can't find anything about this online so any help is appreciated. Thanks!


First of all, since this is your first post you're probably quite confused as to how this argument between Speakeasy and CompImp spilled into your thread. So, ignore that and hopefully you might enjoy other topics here.

As for your question, there is an issue with verbs in Slavic languages in general, namely the Perfective vs. Imperfective aspect. Generally speaking, in the past tense a perfective form of a verb is a completed action and an imperfective is habitual. That is to say, there are only two formulations of the past in Bulgarian, not 3. So discerning between two of our past tenses could be a stumbling block.
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Re: The English Past Perfect in Bulgarian

Postby Chung » Mon Jan 07, 2019 4:48 pm

Pottig wrote:Hi all. I am currently teaching English to a Bulgarian speaker as part of my TEFL course. For one of my assignments, I have to analyse a piece of her written work and note common errors that she makes. To do this, it helps to take into account the student's native language as the error can be rooted in a grammatical/lexical pattern that they are (mistakenly) copying in their English.

In her written piece, about her summer holiday last year, she has a tendency to use the English past perfect tense when the past simple would suffice. For instance, she formulates sentences like we had seen the beautiful mountians and the deep see and in the weekend we'd went for a short tour around the coutry. These two sentences read better to my native ears as we saw the beautiful mountains and in the weekend we went for a short tour around the coutry.

My question: is there some grammatical reason why a Bulgarian native speaker would favour the English past perfect over the past simple when the latter is easier to formulate and makes more sense in the above examples? I can't find anything about this online so any help is appreciated. Thanks!


It's actually more complicated than David1917 lets on.

Bulgarian and Macedonian have much more elaborate conjugation than the other Slavonic languages, and they go beyond the fairly simple distinction between perfective (~ completed actions (even when repeated), emphasis on the result) and imperfective (~ ongoing or repeated action, emphasis on the process).

As far as I can tell, there is what's called "past aorist (indicative)" in Bulgarian and that more or less corresponds to our simple past indicative (i.e. it signals that the action occured in the past, and is known, regardless of whether it was done to completion). I don't quite get how she'd end up using our past perfect in those sentences since the Bulgarian past perfect signals the same as it does in English - an action in the past which preceded another one in the same sentence and in the absence of adverbs.

If I were you, I'd first read this, and then try to have her explain how she perceives actions in the past, and what they signify to her. The considerations in Bulgarian do differ from what we use, and she's either misinterpreting how we use past perfect or had been taught incorrectly and the error has become entrenched. You might have to give some rules of thumb to her about what our conjugation signals about the timing, duration, conditionality or even veracity of the action so that she has a better chance of choosing the appropriate tense/mood/aspect in English.
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Re: The English Past Perfect in Bulgarian

Postby David1917 » Mon Jan 07, 2019 4:51 pm

Chung wrote:It's actually more complicated than David1917 lets on.

Bulgarian and Macedonian have much more elaborate conjugation than the other Slavonic languages, and they go beyond the fairly simple distinction between perfective (~ completed actions (even when repeated), emphasis on the result) and imperfective (~ ongoing or repeated action, emphasis on the process).


Great. Can't wait to learn Bulgarian :lol:
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Re: The English Past Perfect in Bulgarian

Postby Iversen » Mon Jan 07, 2019 9:56 pm

Chung's post gives you a quite good picture of what the Bulgarian verbal system really looks like, so I'm only going to add some words about the other Slavic languages and how they differ from the Bulgarian system.

The point is that the past tense in all Slavic languages goes back to a construction which can't be used in English because English lacks an essential ingredient. If you say that "she has eaten the pie" then you use the auxiliary 'to have' plus a passive past participle. In some other language you use the auxiliary corresponding to 'to be' with the passive past particle of some verbs, like in Italian "sono stato" (but "ho fatto") - literally "(I) was been" and "(I) have done". This is also what we do in Danish, but the Spanish always use the same auxiliary, "haber". The Portuguese too, except they they use another verb, "ter" ("tenho fazido",'I have done'). So it isn't simply a Germanic versus Romance thing.

If you look at Russian you get a shock since the past tense there is a weird thing that is inflected like an adjective, and which typically ends in 'something with an l': Я был, я сделал (ja byl resp. ja sdelal). It is used both to cover the role of the imperfect and the perfect (imparfait vs. passe simple/passe composé in French), and you make the necessary aspect distinctions by choosing a perfective or an imperfective verb. In all Slavic languages verbs generally come in pairs with a shared root, and apparently no native Slavic speaker would ever use one instead of the other, whereas choosing the right one is one of the most difficult things for foreign learners.

In Polish they add a personal ending (here the "-m"), but retain the l-thing ("byłem" 'I was', "zrobiłem" 'I did'). And then they inflect both elements.

In Czech, Slovak and the Southern Slavonic languages the development went in another direction: these languages KEPT the original auxiliary, which has disappeared in Russian and Polish - and that was the verb that corresponded to 'to be'. For instance "I was" was be "bio sam" in Croatian if you are a man, "bila sam" if you are a woman and "bilo sam" if you are some kind of inanimate object. In some cases you can omit the auxiliary, and there are also some complications concerning the order of the elements, but we don't need to go into details with them her. One important thing is that you use the same 'to be' auxiliary with all verbs. The participle in question is a past ACTIVE participle, which doesn't exist in English, so if you were to do a hyperliteral translation of "bio sam" the closest result would be something like "I am was-doing-but-have-finished". Actually when I began learning Serbian I went through a phase where I inside my head would think a construction like '(I) am been' when I saw the Serbian (or Croatian) "sam bio".

And Bulgarian ... sigh. Most things in Bulgarian are quite simple, but the verbs ain't. The main reason is that the Bulgarians have retained a form which they call the "aorist". The word is borrowed from Greek, but the Bulgarian aorist doesn't behave like the aorist in Modern Greek so let's leave Greek alone. Let me first mention that Serbian and Croatian have retained one remnant of the old aorist, namely the auxiliary in the conditional "bio bih" ('I would be'), but apart from that they have scrapped the aorist [edit: ahem, not quite - see the following message]. Not so Bulgarian, where it is very much alive - usually to indicate something that happens at a specific time (more or less like the French Passe simple). Beside it seems that the aorist also can be used as the auxiliary of the conditional ("бих бил"), as in Serbian and Croatian.

The perfect (called past perfect in the table below) is used when you are slightly less specific or more personally involved or the end result matters more than the act itself - but it is sheer hell for foreigners to guess which past tense form they should use. There is also something called imperfect in Bulgarian, but my Bulgarian grammar (by monsieur Feuillet) uses this word about the thing which in any other Slavic language would be called a perfect, namely the combination of a 'to be' form in the present and the -l participle (with its adjective-like inflection). And he calls the -l thing "participle imparfait".

I would however prefer to follow the clear and logical nomenclature used in this table, which you can find at the site Languagegulper. The Bulgarian is normally written with Cyrillic letters, but here the forms have been transcribed. It should however still be easy to see that the auxiliary in the socalled present perfect is the 'to be' verb in the present tense, and that the aorist perfect uses the corresponding aorist forms:

Languagegulper.jpg
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Re: The English Past Perfect in Bulgarian

Postby Daniel N. » Tue Jan 08, 2019 11:18 pm

Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian also retain the aorist tense; it's very rare in Croatia in speech, but used daily in Serbia (as it's closer to Macedonia & Bulgaria - it's a southeastern thing).

There is one more thing: like the English present perfect, the Slavic past tense of volitional perfective verbs is supposed to have some outcomes which hold after the action was completed. For example, if you say otvorio sam prozor (BCMS) it means I have opened the window. Everyone expects it to be open. But if you were using an imperfective verb (otvarao sam prozor) there would be no such implications.

Also, some active past participles can be used as adjectives, like English fallen.
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Re: The English Past Perfect in Bulgarian

Postby aquarius » Thu Jan 10, 2019 9:09 pm

Iversen wrote:In Polish they add a personal ending (here the "-m"), but retain the l-thing ("byłem" 'I was', "zrobiłem" 'I did'). And then they inflect both elements.

In Czech, Slovak and the Southern Slavonic languages the development went in another direction: these languages KEPT the original auxiliary, which has disappeared in Russian and Polish - and that was the verb that corresponded to 'to be'.


Hello Iversen,

I'd prefer to say that the original auxiliary did not disappear in Polish, but that it fused with the l-participe, becoming the personal ending you have mentioned.

Let's compare some past tense conjugations in Slovak and in Polish:

SK ........... PL
čítal som . czytałem
čítal si ..... czytałeś
čítal ......... czytał
čítali sme. czytaliśmy
čítali ste... czytaliście
čítali......... czytali
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