15 Comments
Is there no word for "for" in german? "paid for" here stems from bezahlt?... past tense?
zahlen = to pay (intransitive); bezahlen = to pay for. Similarly with antworten = to answer (intransitive), beantworten = to answer (transitive). So the question is, why can't English say "to pay the TV"? :)
1650
Mh, I thought it was a transitive form (like to pay a debt or a bill) that made sense.
Well, thanks for correcting me, Haley. Again :D!
I said "he has the tv paid off." It was really a shot in the dark, but the reason I didn't just say that he paid for the tv is that "has paid" is not the literal "has", and I assumed that it would be conveyed a different way in other languages. Is present perfect then created the same way in German as in English?
- 376
Chitresh, No you cannot. The verb always goes to the end in such cases.
That's correct; bezahlen is just to pay for, not to buy. "Er hat den Fernseher gekauft" would be "He has bought the television".
I can't imagine the difference between paying for something and buying it. What purpose does this distinction serve?
Paying is handing over money. Buying is transferring ownership.
Perhaps I went into the store and picked out a TV set because I need a new one. But I don't have the money, so my father paid for it. But I was the one who bought it (= whose property it became).
