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This tense has (widely) the same meaning as the preterite and very often replaces the latter in colloquial German. An English perfect tense is often expressed by the present in German. For example, "I have lived in Germany for three years now." → Ich lebe jetzt seit drei Jahren in Deutschland. (Literally "I live now for three years in Germany.")
Haber is an irregular verb. When used as an impersonal verb in the present tense, it has a special conjugation for the third person singular (hay). Clauses with the verb haber do not have an explicit subject; its only argument is a direct object noun phrase that does not agree with the verb. Haber has its 'natural meaning' of tener 'to have'. [10]
The German present tense matches both the English present ("I walk to work every day") and also the present progressive ("I am walking to work right now"), to which standard German has no direct equivalent. (See below for a colloquial alternative.) It is formed similarly to the English present tense, by directly conjugating the relevant verb to ...
The Germanic verb system carried two innovations over the previous Proto-Indo-European verb system: . Simplification to two tenses: present (also conveying future meaning) and past (sometimes called "preterite" and conveying the meaning of all of the following English forms: "I did, I have done, I had done, I was doing, I have been doing, I had been doing").
Middle High German had two numbers, singular and plural, and three persons. The language had two simple tenses: present and preterite (or "simple past"). In addition, there were also three tenses that made use of auxiliary verbs: perfect, pluperfect, and future, all much less frequently used than in the modern language.
The grammar of the German language is quite similar to that of the other Germanic languages.Although some features of German grammar, such as the formation of some of the verb forms, resemble those of English, German grammar differs from that of English in that it has, among other things, cases and gender in nouns and a strict verb-second word order in main clauses.
The verb later transformed to *haveĊ in many Romance languages (but etymologically Spanish haber), resulting in irregular indicative present forms *ai, *as, and *at (all first-, second- and third-person singular), but ho, hai, ha in Italian and -pp-(appo) in Logudorese Sardinian in present tenses.
The present tense used the primary eventive endings, and was used specifically to refer to present events, although it could also refer to future events. The past tense referred to past events, and used the secondary eventive endings. Perfective verbs always used the secondary endings, but did not necessarily have a past-tense meaning.