Talk:Latin tenses (semantics)

Rating

The rating of this article was Start class but recently changed by FloridaMan21 to grade B. In my view, it does not merit a B. The author's division of Latin tenses into "Primary", "Secondary Future", "Secondary Present", "Secondary Past" and "Tertiary", which the article adopts, appears to be entirely his own invention and not found in any authority on Latin. No reference is given for this division. The tenses agam 'I will do' or 'I will be doing' and ago 'I am doing' are both classified as both "Primary" and as "Secondary Present" for some reason; this is certainly not based on the terminology of any standard textbook. All the Latin examples and translations are copied wholesale from the article Latin tenses. Kanjuzi (talk) 17:05, 8 August 2024 (UTC)

I have reviewed the article once more and determined it is in the Start-C class range. I see @Kanjuzi that you are very involved in language-related articles so I highly respect your opinion. Thank you for your observation. FloridaMan21 (talk) 20:52, 8 August 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Kanjuzi, this is not the case.

there are two compatible functional theories in linguistics about semantic tense. In an older functional theory, there are 'absolute tense' (future, present, past) and there are 'relative tenses' ('priority', 'simultaneity', 'posteriority'). There is a more modern functional theory, where the absolute tense is called 'primary tense' and each degree of distantiation from the current situation gets a larger number: 'secondary tense', 'tertiary tense'... This is Linguistic Theory irrespectively of language!!! It's theory of whichever language, not theory of Latin language. And it provides a way of organising the examples already found in formal grammars based on the uses. I cite Halliday's introduction to functional grammar where the theory is explained, I give the page (Reference XII). So it is false that it is entirely my invention and you know that because we already discussed this. The fact that you do not want to check the book where the theory is explained is not my fault. The fact that you prefer formal theories is not my fault and there is the article Latin tenses for the formal description. By the way, I just saw that the terms "past-in-past" and "past-in-future" are used in the third paragraph of the article about Grammatical tense, which shows they are using the terms of the modern functioal theory. Again, this is simply the new way researchers are referring to chained tenses because, with corpora, we are able to describe less frequent linguistic phenomena such as tertiary and quaternary tenses and saying 'relative-to-relativie-to-relative-to-absolute tense' is less practical than saying 'quaternary tense'.

Moreover, the functioal theories have been applied to the description of Latin in both articles and grammar books as I have abundantly cited. So it is not true that these terms are not found in any authority on Latin. You know that too because we already discussed about this.

Given the timing of the grade lowering, I assume you did this as a reaction to the fact that your article on formal description of Latin tenses was graded C and that you think that your article is better than this one. Instead of improving your article based on the reviewer's suggestions, which is something you and I could do cooperatively, you came here and lowered the score.

The timing also implies that you did not like my suggestions on the talk page of what to do in reaction to the review. And I know for a fact that you did not like my attempt to include the formal theory into Latin tenses, as suggested by the reviewer, because you reverted them and asked me not to mess with 'your article'.

@FloridaMan21, I do not know how to react to this. Is there a way in Wikipedia to stimulate cooperation and lower tension and competition? I would be available to cooperate with Kanjuzi in improving the theoretical part of his article, if he is willing. I can leave that article alone, if he prefers. But I would like him to stop making false claims about me and this article to lower its grading. Daniel Couto Vale (talk) 08:34, 9 August 2024 (UTC)

Kanjuzi's criticism 1: double classification of 'am doing'

@Kanjuzi made the following criticism: The tenses agam 'I will do' or 'I will be doing' and ago 'I am doing' are both classified as both "Primary" and as "Secondary Present" for some reason; this is certainly not based on the terminology of any standard textbook.

@FloridaMan21, there is no claim in this article that the paradigm ["am doing", "is doing", "are doing"] is called both 'present' and 'present-in-present'. The claim is that these wordings can be 'used' either with a 'present meaning' or witth a 'present-in-present meaning'.

The reason for the terminological confusion lies in the fact that Kanjuzi is only familiar with the formal theory of tense whereby verbs and periphrases are called 'present', 'furture', 'imperfect', 'perfect'... In most formal theories, the paradigm ["am travelling", "is travelling", "are travelling"] is called 'present continuous' and it is said to be either (1) 'used' with 'present meaning' or (2) 'used' with 'future meaning' in English given that we can say both (1) "I am travelling now. I'll call you guys when I arrive." (present) or (2) "Sorry, I won't be able to join you guys because I am travelling on the weekend." (future).

In a functional theory, the 'use' (a.k.a. 'function') is what gets a name, not the paradigm. In functional descriptions, one says that there are different ways to represent a future action in English ("am travelling", "will travel", "shall travel"...) and there are different ways to represent a present action in English ("am travelling", "have been travelling"...). The fact that "am travelling" appeares both in the 'future meaning' and in the 'present meaning' sections is due to the fact that the wording "am travelling" can be used to mean either 'future' or 'present'.

This is the reason why "agam" (am doing) is presented as an example of both "primary" and "secondary" tenses. Saying this only means that "agam" (am doing) can be used both to indicate what is going on now (primary present) or what is going on while we are doing something else (secondary present). The secondary present carries this "simultaneity" feature of the secondary event. If we put the sentece "The alarm is still ringing as I am leaving the building." to the past, we will have "The alarm was still ringing as I left the building." because "is ringing"/"am leaving" can construe either a primary or a secondary tense while "was ringing" and "left" usually don't. (Notice: 'usually')

The functional theory of tense has been applied to the description of Latin. For insntacne, researchers such as Aerts (since 2018) in his articles and Guerreira (2021) in his grammar book (both cited in the article) have been applying the functional theory of tense to the analysis of Latin texts. They are using the terms "absolute" and "relative" which are older versions of the terms "primary" and "secondary" in general linguistics as discussed in books reporting comparative studies on tense in the last 10-15 years (including Latin).

Given this extensive explanation, I would like us to close this discussion (a) because this is neither a 'double classification' of uses nor a 'double naming' of uses and (b) because there is the article Latin tenses where we already name the paradigms and list the uses of each paradigm. Daniel Couto Vale (talk) 10:57, 9 August 2024 (UTC)

Kanjuzi's criticism 2: example and translation copy

@Kanjuzi criticised that All the Latin examples and translations are copied wholesale from the article Latin tenses..

@FloridaMan21, not all examples and translations were copied from Latin tenses, though many examples were. Some examples were searched in a corpus and added to the secondary and tertiary tense sections because there weren't any in the other article.

There is a good reason for using similar examples both here and in Latin tenses. Whoever is learning Latin or doing comparative studies between different languages can find both the overall organisation of uses in this article (semantics) and the overall organisation of verb paradigms in Latin tenses (forms and uses) and they will profit from the fact that the majority of examples occur in both articles. This means the article would not become any better if I open "PHI Concordance" website, search for other examples there to replace the ones already here.

I understand that Kanjuzi did a lot of work collecting examples and selecting translations, a work that I did not have to do. This means that this article profited from his. If there is any way to credit Kanjuzi for the examples and translations that he did, I would like to do this. However, it is false that this article is in any sense a copy of Latin tenses. You can very well check it out and you will see how the two articles are differet and you will notice that they serve different purposes.

@FloridaMan21, what should be done in this case? Replacement of examples due to authoral disputes or Kanjuzi's crediting for his previous work in the talk page? Daniel Couto Vale (talk) 11:14, 9 August 2024 (UTC)