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- "Vi har inte beställt vin."
13 Comments
I take back my last comment about the nature of ordering. Here the present perfect is possible, because you could be saying, for example, that while the wine expert of a group of friends was absent, they decided to wait until he returned to order the wine.
On the other hand, if something arrived at your table that you didn't order and never intended to order, you would use the preterite (also spelled without the final e, and also sometimes called the simple past tense). E.g.,"We did not order wine."
Yes, I was just going to complain that Duolingo did not accept my translation, which was in the simple past tense.
Hmmm, the Swedish team is fantastic. Strange they didn't fix that. Hope you reported it.
I did, but I think I understand why I am confused about the tenses now. My native language is Dutch and if I think about what I would say in Dutch (We hebben geen wijn besteld), using the present perfect suddenly makes sense :D The simple past (We bestelden geen wijn) would be really odd.
What are the forms of this verb? I don't quite remember it from the previous lessons
Just to be clear, for the benefit of others reading: this is not the same construction as the Swedish sentence.
Beställt seems to be related to ställt (put). Could someone say if this is correct and how adding the prefix "be" turns it into "ordered", please.
be- is a very old Germanic prefix which can have several meanings, including that of changing the state or location of an object. So by combining that with "put", it acquired the meaning of "put here", which then turned into "order".
Thank you. Very helpful. I can now see from my dictionary that many Swedish words, and quite a few English, are formed by adding be- in this way. Begråta, for example, seems to have the same construction and meaning as bewail.
