Yes actually. The long story short is in some languages, like English, subordinate clauses default to agreeing with the tense of the main clause, as in the translation. But some languages don't do this. It's especially common in indirect speech. 1/3
For example, In English, if I said "I'll go home" someone could report my speech by saying "They said that they'd go home", using would as the past tense of will to agree with the past tense said. 2/3
But in a language like Yiddish, which doesn't do this, the sentence would be זײ האָבן געזאָגט אַז זײ װילן גײן אַהײם. Which literally translates to "they said that they will go home" but means "they said they'd go home". You can look up "sequence of tenses" for more info on this type of stuff as well 3/3
Comments