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Catalan Audio Request

ielanguages
6 Words / 1 Recordings / 4 Comments
Note to recorder:

To be used in video comparing Romance languages

fa tres dies

feia dues setmanes

Recordings

  • Three days ago / Two weeks ago ( recorded by marcmiquel ), central

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    Corrected Text
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    fa tres dies

    fa dues setmanes

Comments

ielanguages
Aug. 21, 2018

Thanks!

I have a question about using feia though - is this not used in past tenses to express ago or before?

An example from the book EuRom5 is:

Era la mateixa persona que ja havien detingut feia un parell de setmanes.

Could you also fa in this sentence instead of feia?

marcmiquel
Aug. 21, 2018

I translated "three days ago" as "fa tres dies" because this is the most accurate translation for this short sentence.

"feia tres dies" would mean talking about the past from a reference point which is not the present. For instance, "it was raining on Monday, it had not been raining for three days". "plovia el dilluns, no havia plogut des de feia tres dies".

"feia temps que no obria aquella porta" "it has been some time without opening that door".

In regards of the sentence you posted, I would translate it as "It was the same person they had arrest a couple of weeks earlier".

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I think the same reasoning applies from Catalan applies to Spanish: https://rhinospike.com/audio_requests/ielanguages/47574/

and Italian is also not quite exact:
https://rhinospike.com/audio_requests/ielanguages/47572/
"due settimane prima" is "two weeks earlier or before"

ielanguages
Aug. 21, 2018

Thanks so much for the explanation! French also changes like Italian (il y a - auparavant), so I will use complete sentences to make the distinctions clearer. Sometimes English could use ago or earlier/before, so it is a little complicated translating into the Romance languages.

marcmiquel
Aug. 21, 2018

It is true. And Romance languages have no perfect equivalence of past tenses among each other. In Catalan we use the past "vaig + infinitive" to imply something from a not recent past "el dilluns vaig cantar una cançó" ("On Monday I sang a song"), whereas "he + infinitive" is only used for recent past ("Avui he cantat una cançó"), and the limit is today, so it cannot be used to described something that happened yesterday. Instead, in Italian they use "ho cantatto una canzone" o "lunedì ho cantatto una canzone" in the same way, which implies that Italian speakers learning Catalan get confused and use "he cantat una cançó" even though they had done it a couple of weeks earlier...

Spanish from South America is also quite funny, since they use the simple past for something very recent, in a similar way to English. "Esta mañana desayuné una manzana". In Spanish from Spain it would be "Esta mañana he desayunado una manzana".

It is hard to keep track of all these equivalences.

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