Accept Another article from crazy proofreaders trying to fight the intricacies of the Czech language to help you distinguish between state, action and purpose.
Do you remember the famous book by Karel Poláček call udant and Francimor? Most of us must have read it in our childhood. It describes the fates of two successful sons of a reclusive witch who did not go to school. Therefore, they were very surpris by the inspection question of the inspector, who ask them without warning: “What is the past participle?”
But to be honest, this question would probably surprise many of us, even though we attend school properly. And since I would like to explain in this article how to use such a participle correctly, let’s first remember what it is.
Watch out for the change in meaning
So let’s start with a definition from the dictionary: The past participle is “a nominal verb form having the nature of an action adjective in the passive gender and past tense”. Yay, now we get it! What would we do without dictionaries… No, seriously – it’s not that complicat. If you still remember the difference between active and passive, there you have it, there’s nothing more to it. While the verb in the active voice is, for example, here – “we built apartment buildings” -, the passive voice looks like this – “the apartment buildings were built”. And “built” is the past participle.
And why are we even concern with
The passive participle can sometimes be confus with an adjective that is very similar in sentences (e.g.: persecut – persecut). Sometimes such confusion is not harmful, as in the above case with the verb to chase – there is no difference between the statements “I am chas by the thailand phone number data mafia” and “I am chas by the mafia”. However, there are cases when the adjective is replac by a participle, completely changing the meaning of the sentence or an incorrect conjunction appears.
So how to distinguish whether to use an adjective or a participle? It is necessary to understand a small difference in meaning: While the adjective describes the state , the passive participle indicates the action . In a certain context, these two meanings must then be distinguish.
A typical example is the following sentence:
This player was dethron two weeks ago from the post of world number one.
The sentence contains an adjective and therefore describes a state. We find out what position the given player was (or rather wasn’t) two weeks ago on the rankings. He wasn’t world number one then. But when did he lose this post? It could have been 15 days ago, but also a year ago.
If the author want to convey that the player in question fell from the number one position just two ga4 recommend events weeks ago (which he probably really meant), he would have to write:
This player was dethron as world number one two weeks ago.
Now it’s clear – here we describe cz lists the what happen two weeks ago.