Mime-Version: |
1.0 |
Sender: |
|
Content-Transfer-Encoding: |
quoted-printable |
From: |
|
Date: |
Mon, 6 Oct 1997 11:28:57 -0600 |
In-Reply-To: |
|
Content-Type: |
text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" |
Reply-To: |
|
Parts/Attachments: |
|
|
>Marc
Departement d'Etudes Anglophones (FORELL-AIT),
Your comment and those of the others who have responded have convinced not
to use "must" in the past. Maybe I got the impression that thisis was
acceptable from reading older texts, or British English--I don't know.
Anyway, Wendell suggested that "debía" might be the subjunctive. Actually,
it's the imperfect. I see that you work with French, which has the same
tense and, like Spanish, has basically two past tenses that roughly
correspond the one tense in English. Also, there is a nearly exact
correspondence in meaning and use between "devoir" and "deber."
Just for fun, could you tell me how, in a literary/academic text, you would
translate "devait"? "Les femmes aztecs devaient respecter les
traditions"--or whatever, and assuming I haven't botched up that French
sentence too badly.
You're going to say "had to," right?
Alan
|
|
|