10 Comments
Word for word, these future preterite constructions look like something else in English. How do you differentiate in swedish? For example if I wanted to say "she would come after him" as in describing something someone might have done habitually in the past, rather than something someone was going to do in future.
Okay, I tried: "She would be coming after him." To me that makes the best sense in English, but it wasn't accepted.
The two correct solutions are conflicting. "She would come after him" means she still intends to come. "She was going to come after him" means that she would have come, but no longer intends to. The correct way to phrase the first sentence is "she would have come after him", that way both sentences have the same meaning.
895
The thing is that the Swedish sentence covers both those, but She would have come after him would be Hon skulle ha kommit efter honom.
- 144
To find out if "skulle" is referring to "would" or "was going to" is it a matter of context?
- 895
should seems to have several meanings, but for the most common one (which is like 'ought to'), that would be hon borde …
I see your point, but that's not necessarily the case. For instance:
As he looked back, he immediately knew that she was going to come after him.
Agreed, I think they try and avoid using 'have' to avoid confusion with the perfect tense, but it's unclear without it.
- 659
No, that's not fully correct. Although, yes, those sentences could mean what you said in ONE context, both of them have the same practical meaning in the context of, say, explaining a complex plan involving multiple people. Think of a travel itinerary where people arrive from multiple locations, or a schedule of speakers at an event, or the narration over a montage in a heist movie.
